Comment by oliwary
6 hours ago
IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.
6 hours ago
IMO it really came into its own after the first season. S1 felt like mad men but with computers, whereas in the latter seasons it focused more on the characters - quite beautiful and sad at times.
The BBC made a docudrama, Micro Men, with Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry.
Sophie Wilson cameos when they have a fight.
IMO the first series was excellent, the 2nd took a massive downturn and stopped watching after that.
I vaguely remember that they tried to reboot it several times. So the same crew invented personal computers, BBSes and the Internet (or something like that), but every time they started from being underfunded unknowns. They really tried to make the series work.
That's not really what happens at all. The characters on the show never make the critical discoveries or are responsible for the major breakthroughs, they're competing in markets that they ultimately cannot win in, because while the show is fictional, it also follows real computing history.
(MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW)
For example, in the first season, the characters we follow are not inventing the PC - that has been done already. They're one of many companies making an IBM clone, and they are modestly successful but not remarkably so. At the end of the season, one of the characters sees the Apple Macintosh and realizes that everything he had done was a waste of time (from his perspective, he wanted to change the history of computers, not just make a bundle of cash), he wasn't actually inventing the future, he just thought he was. They also don't really start from being underfunded unknowns in each season - the characters find themselves in new situations based on their past experiences in ways that feel reasonable to real life.