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Comment by 0xCE0 | Hacker News Reader

The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.

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I totally agree. I watched it 3 times as well. One in London with a panel of the general magic employees. It was an amazing experience

Oh wow, that must have been magical. Have you seen "Halt and Catch Fire"? These two masterpieces are my top 2 watchings. Both so amazing but generally unknown/underrated.

I agree with you! I love that they're both extremely underrated. I remember buying the Documentary and watching it immediately. The fact that they're not well known, gives I guess our side of world our own sorta "special something" to watch/enjoy.

I love h&cf but it’s important for people who are curious about it to know that it is definitely an overdramatized AMC piece akin to mad men. It’s basically mad men but PCs lol.

It has some brilliant writing and the acting is off the charts (whoever handled casting is unbelievable), but man it can definitely make you roll your eyes occasionally lol

Rarely. I actually expected it to go in a somewhat different direction. But as somewhat who was at COMDEX and in the industry in general during that period, it felt pretty true.

It’s really a lot of the interpersonal drama. It’s not like that stuff that didn’t happen, but AMC does have a tendency to soap it up

It's a TV show, not a documentary. Through that lens, it seems reasonable.

Yeah in London, I was sitting next to Tony Fadell. I couldn’t believe it!

I didn’t know about this show. Thanks for the recommendation I’ll check it out.

Is it based on a true story?

Not based on a true story, but anyone familiar with computing history will see how real-world events were turned into plot lines; e.g. Compaq’s reverse engineering of IBMs sdk, the competition between directory-based index of Yahoo and algorithms of Google.

I've somehow missed The General Magic (something I'm about to fix!), but Halt and Catch Fire was certainly great, enjoyed it very much

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