| 1 | [[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/810ae2f0a87be99751778d85650064ee.jpg]] |
| 2 | ->''"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing."'' |
| 3 | -->--'''Joe [=MacMillan=]''' |
| 4 | |
| 5 | ''Halt and Catch Fire'' is an American television series that aired on Creator/{{AMC}} from 2014 to 2017. |
| 6 | |
| 7 | Set in the [[MediaNotes/ComputerWars tech revolution]] of The80s, it is the story of former IBM sales executive Joe [=MacMillan=], hardware engineer Gordon Clark, young prodigy software programmer Cameron Howe, and Gordon's wife and fellow engineer Donna Clark. |
| 8 | |
| 9 | In the first season, set in [[The80s 1983]], Joe, Gordon, and Cameron, as employees of a small [[UsefulNotes/DFWMetroplex Dallas-based]] system software firm called Cardiff Electric, set out to create a revolutionary [[Platform/IBMPersonalComputer IBM PC clone]] which is smaller, faster, more powerful, and more affordable than the original. While designing the machine, the team must deal with the tension of their personal and professional issues as well as the threat of the machine never making it to market. |
| 10 | |
| 11 | Season 2 took place one year after the events of the finale of Season 1, mainly focusing on Cameron's startup company, Mutiny. She and Donna faced threats, both new and familiar, which could have been the company's undoing. Season 3 saw the Mutiny crew seeking a fresh slate in California's Silicon Valley, hoping to become the next big thing. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | The [[http://www.amc.com/shows/halt-and-catch-fire/talk/2016/10/halt-and-catch-fire-renewed-for-fourth-and-final-season fourth and final season]] saw a time shift to The90s and a focus on the advent of TheInternet. |
| 14 | |
| 15 | ---- |
| 16 | !!Tropes aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing: |
| 17 | * The70s: As with ''Series/FreaksAndGeeks'', the first season of the series shows how '70s fashion and culture hung on into the early '80s, such as the Clarks' home decor, Gordon's taste in music and Cardiff Electric being based around mainframe computers. |
| 18 | * AdvertisedExtra: Sara Wheeler in Season 2. Aleska Palladino was added to the main cast for some reason, despite being a nothing more than a SatelliteLoveInterest to Joe, and she is PutOnABus, presumably never to be seen again, at the end of the season. |
| 19 | * AffluentAscetic: Cameron is never interested in worldly possessions or luxury. Even after getting a job at Cardiff at a good wage, she lives in her office until she has to be told to get her own place. At Mutiny, she lives at the dilapidated hacker den out of which the company is run and wears clothes that are literally falling apart. After returning from Japan as a famous game designer, she decides to buy an empty field and live out of a trailer that her boyfriend barely fits inside. |
| 20 | * TheAlcoholic: |
| 21 | ** Gordon is introduced with Donna picking him up from what is implied to be a repeat visit to the drunk tank. |
| 22 | ** In season 4, Donna slowly starts to become a LadyDrunk due to the stress of her job. She eventually gets a DUI, leading to Gordon picking ''her'' up from the drunk tank, and is forced into AA. Thereafter, she politely declines all offers of alcohol. |
| 23 | * AllMenArePerverts: |
| 24 | ** In "Adventure", after Cameron names her BIOS "Lovelace", the engineers assumed she was talking about pornographic actress Linda Lovelace. |
| 25 | ** In "Giant", Kenny Burke, a local industrial designer Bosworth had previously hired, insults Joe for not paying attention to the girls at a strip club. |
| 26 | ** In "Up Helly Aa", while the Giant was still malfunctioning during Cardiff's suite party, Joe distracts the drunken COMDEX attendees with booth babes from the neighboring PORNDEX convention, which is a real-life event focused on pornography related consumer products. |
| 27 | * AlwaysSomeoneBetter: |
| 28 | ** The problem confronting the Cardiff crew, obsessing over beating [=IBM=]... only for Joe to recognize that the Apple Macintosh is a better product ''the second he sees it''. |
| 29 | ** Subverted with the Slingshot computer which is generally inferior to the Giant except that due to having fewer features it is also slightly faster and cheaper. Joe and Gordon recognize that by sacrificing some of Cameron's innovative features they can outperform the Slingshot and thus win over the buyers. |
| 30 | ** At the end of the series, Comet admits defeat when [[spoiler:Yahoo]] is shown as the default web search engine for Netscape. |
| 31 | * AnachronisticSoundtrack: While most of the soundtrack sticks to songs appropriate to the period, some modern songs are used, such as Suuns' "[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgicu6G6n8 2020]]", which plays as Joe [[spoiler: immolates the first shipment of Giants in the Season 1 finale.]] |
| 32 | * AmicableExes: [[spoiler:Gordon and Donna still seem to care for each other despite being divorced in the Season 3 finale. Gordon bails Donna out from the drunk tank, and Donna is devastated by Gordon's death in Season 4.]] |
| 33 | * ArtisticLicenseEngineering: |
| 34 | ** Gordon and Joe use a bunch of equipment to access the IBM PC BIOS when a few simple commands would suffice. Also, Gordon desolders a socketed ROM chip. |
| 35 | ** Dust and contaminants will easily ruin a hard drive and its stored data. While attempting to recover the data off Cameron's burned out hard drive, Donna and the Cardiff engineers should have been handling the platters in a dust-free clean room environment instead of out in the open in Cameron's basement "office" in "Close to the Metal". |
| 36 | ** For testing the Giant's BIOS, the engineers should've had a EPROM programmer on site rather than shipping the code to a third party, so the EPROM can be rewritten as needed. |
| 37 | ** Cameron is paranoid over the possibility of a repeat of the near-disaster of [[spoiler:Gordon's Sonaris program]] and wants to shut down all of "Community" over it. In practice, a programmer could easily simply delete the file-uploading feature to prevent the BBS from in any way trying to execute user-uploaded software. |
| 38 | ** Gordon is seen working on a Commodore 64 in Season 2, but the real C64 does not use the "exe" file extension; it uses the "prg" file extension. He also codes in C on the machine[[note]]In fact at the time, programming purists advocated for (with good reasons) direct assembly-language coding for computers of the era. Gordon would have been aware of this.[[/note]]. While C compilers did exist for the C64, an experienced programmer like Gordon would have preferred a more powerful machine in order to get faster cross-compile times (e.g. a Unix workstation), especially since he's just come into a lot of money. But then again, Mutiny runs on the C64, and he explicitly designs the program to gauge the size of Mutiny's customer base. |
| 39 | ** Sonaris somehow runs on both C64s and IBM [=PCs=]; there is no in-verse mention of cross-compiling for the systems' different architectures, either. |
| 40 | * ArtisticLicenseHistory: The [[VideoGame/ColossalCave Adventure game]] was popular among CS students in the late '70s. It strains credibility that the 'code monkeys', aside from Lev, Yo-Yo and the rest of the Mutiny coders, weren't already familiar with it. |
| 41 | * AwesomeButImpractical: |
| 42 | ** The operating system Cameron wrote for the Giant. Her query-based user interface was meant to be more user friendly than the command line interface of MS-DOS; however, her OS required a full ''megabyte'' of RAM[[note]]The maximum amount of memory the Intel 8088, the CPU used in the IBM PC (and its clones), could address[[/note]] and negatively impacted the Giant's boot time, system response time, and IBM PC software compatibility. Hunt Whitmarsh admitted that Cameron's OS was ahead of its time, but it was a "memory hog". |
| 43 | ** Gordon notes that Simon Church, the designer for the Giant's case, also designed the Countach and the [=DeLorean=]. While Gordon notes that both cars look good, he claims that both cars are [[TheAllegedCar in the shop every hundred miles]]. |
| 44 | ** Gordon believes that the Macintosh with its graphical user interface is "all bells and whistles and zero utility".[[note]]Until the introduction of the 512K model, the original 128K Macintosh was indeed this, unless one had an external floppy drive[[/note]] |
| 45 | ** Yo-Yo's backgammon game, due to its size and use of color. |
| 46 | --->'''Lev:''' Hello! Our games have to run on phone lines! Not on a plastic cartridge with a crapton of memory. |
| 47 | ** While discussing the World Wide Web, Gordon calls the [=NeXTcube=], the then-cutting-edge computer which CERN developed the first web browser on, expensive and impractical, especially as the IBM PC-compatible platform[[note]]which would evolve into the "Wintel" platform by 1993[[/note]], while far less powerful compared to the [=NeXTcube=], was [[BoringButPractical far more prevalent and becoming increasingly more inexpensive]]. |
| 48 | * BadassBoast: "IBM will have to clone ''us''." To hammer the point home, Joe burns a binder containing the source code which he and Gordon had complied from their reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS. |
| 49 | -->'''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' Oh, that's what I call [[BurnBabyBurn cooking the books]]! |
| 50 | * BaitAndSwitch: |
| 51 | ** Joanie runs away after catching Gordon and Donna arguing. [[spoiler: Fortunately, she's just hiding in the back yard.]] |
| 52 | ** We don't hear the results of Joe's [[spoiler:HIV antibody test]]. After receiving the news, he robotically stumbles to his patio and stares stoically out at the view until he finally breaks into a huge grin, revealing that it was actually good news. |
| 53 | ** In the final episode, Cameron learns that Joe has returned home to the city where IBM is headquartered. When we see him, he's bought a Lotus Esprit, wears a slick suit, and carries a briefcase, implying that he's returned to his previous life as an IBM executive. In reality, he's [[spoiler:become a college humanities professor]]. |
| 54 | * BatmanGambit: |
| 55 | ** Joe's entire scheme relies on correctly predicting how people will react to his manipulations and using this knowledge to put [[AnOfferYouCantRefuse them in a situation where they can't or won't say no to him]]. |
| 56 | ** In "Up Helly Aa", Gordon pulls one of these in order to get Cardiff Electric a suite at COMDEX after their reservations had been cancelled. Gordon deliberately sabotages a weaker company's lackluster presentation while Joe [[BavarianFireDrill posed as an IBM representative]] to backup Gordon's bluff. |
| 57 | * BeenThereShapedHistory: |
| 58 | ** In-universe, Donna and her then-boss Hunt were responsible for Texas Instruments dropping the Platform/TI99. |
| 59 | ** In the Season 3 finale, Joe, Donna, Cameron and Gordon start work on a browser for the World Wide Web, which has just been announced by Tim Berners-Lee in a paper. Joe has also recently met Berners-Lee at a conference. |
| 60 | * BigBad: |
| 61 | ** IBM, early on, leaving Cardiff Electric for dead [[EveryManHasHisPrice after poaching more than two-thirds of their business]]. |
| 62 | ** By the end of the first season, the real threat to the company comes from [[spoiler: Hunt Whitmarsh]], who had ripped off Cardiff's design to build a [[EvilKnockoff competing computer]] that would be cheaper and thus could steal their thunder at COMDEX. |
| 63 | ** After hijacking Mutiny, [[spoiler:Westgroup Energy]] reveal themselves to be this. |
| 64 | * BigShutUp: Joe gives this to Gordon as "advice" for the next time the former attempts to close a sale. |
| 65 | -->'''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' I need you to do me one favor. \ |
| 66 | '''Gordon Clark:''' Okay. \ |
| 67 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' Next time I move to close, this is what you do. \ |
| 68 | '''Gordon Clark:''' Okay, what? \ |
| 69 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' [[PunctuatedForEmphasis You... SHUT! UP!]] |
| 70 | * BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Gordon is dead. Joe discovers that Yahoo! is the default search engine in the brand-new Netscape browser, and shuts down Comet while he and Cameron break up. Bosworth has a clean bill of health and many years ahead of him to spend with Diane. Donna becomes the head of the firm and wants to work with Cameron again. Joanie is starting to mellow out while while taking a break year before college. Haley seems to have gained some perspective and peace as she navigates through all her emotional challenges, and her mother has figured out that she's a lesbian. Joe becomes a humanities professor and finally seems happy.]] |
| 71 | * BlatantLies: To keep IBM from suing Cardiff Electric into the ground, Gordon tells IBM's legal counsel that Cardiff and Bosworth had approached him about designing a PC rather than Joe. |
| 72 | * {{Bookends}}: |
| 73 | ** The first scene and the last scene in the series both have Joe addressing a college class with "Let me start by asking a question." |
| 74 | ** Gordon is introduced having to be picked up out of the drunk tank by his wife. In the final season, one of the last things he is seen doing is picking up his (now ex-) wife out of the drunk tank in kind. |
| 75 | ** The episode "Goodwill" begins and ends with a flashback of Gordon and Donna in [[The70s 1976]] during the early days of their marriage after Joanie was born. |
| 76 | * BoringButPractical: The Giant is a very innovative computer but ultimately Joe has to market it as a "station wagon", a reliable workhorse that will get the job done without any fancy features. Cameron sees it as a betrayal since her vision has always been that a computer should be "more than just a calculator". |
| 77 | * BrattyTeenageDaughter: Though still a preteen, Joanie Clark becomes this in Season 3. She's 14 by the end of the season and even more bratty and worsens as such by the final season, even going as far as experimenting with beer and marijuana and smoking cigarettes. |
| 78 | * BrandX: Ranger brand soda. The soda comes in many flavors (e.g. orange, lemon-lime, grape, etc), and Cameron is most often seen drinking the orange flavor. |
| 79 | * BritishBrevity: Four seasons, ten episodes each. |
| 80 | * BuffySpeak: Joe tries to convince Gordon to join him by saying "Computers aren't the thing, they're the thing that gets us to the thing." |
| 81 | * BullyAndWimpPairing: To an extent, Joe and Gordon. Nathan Cardiff [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] this, comparing Joe to a rattlesnake and Gordon to a little bunny rabbit. |
| 82 | * BunnyEarsLawyer: Cameron's work habits are... unorthodox, to say the least, but she may be Cardiff's best hope of creating a computer that doesn't resemble IBM's handiwork. |
| 83 | * BurningTheShips: Joe deliberately informs IBM that Joe and Gordon, as Cardiff Electric employees, have reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS code. IBM sends in an army of lawyers and Nathan Cardiff is left with two choices: fully commit his company to the PC clone project Joe is advocating or get sued into bankruptcy by IBM. Everyone is furious at Joe but in the end he gets his way. This is then subverted when we realize that the project's failure will ruin everyone except Joe: He forced everyone else to take a high personal risk and commit fully to the project, but due to his father's connections he can walk away at any time and resume his old life. |
| 84 | * CallBack: |
| 85 | ** In the pilot, Gordon fixes his daughters' broken Speak & Spell and reprograms it so that it greets them by name upon starting up. Cameron attempts to do the same with Cardiff's new machine, but gets shortly shut down by Gordon. May also double as an ironic kind of PerspectiveReversal. |
| 86 | ** In "High Plains Hardware", Bosworth tells Cameron that she work as late as she'd like but cannot live at the office. In "New Coke", Cameron tells Boz the same thing, that he can work for Mutiny but cannot live at the Mutiny house. |
| 87 | ** In "NIM" Joe and Cameron are at COMDEX 90 and see a booth where two guys are presenting their new printer. They realize that it is the same two guys that Joe and Gordon conned out of their suite at COMDEX 83. The new version of the printer has improved significantly but its creators are still as inept at marketing as they were seven years before and it suffers a feed error during demonstration that makes a nasty noise and causes it to jump. Joe and Cameron troll them about naming their printer The [=SPrinter=] and Cameron blatantly takes most of their promotional lighters. |
| 88 | ** In the first episode of the series Cameron wears a red sweater and in the first episode of the final season, she wears a similar red sweater. |
| 89 | ** In the final episode, Donna and Cameron troubleshoot a hard drive crash, as they did in the first season. |
| 90 | ** In the final episode, Haley listens to one of the calming cassette tapes that Gordon made for himself. |
| 91 | * TheChainsOfCommanding: |
| 92 | ** John Bosworth hates to fire people he has known closely for years and the stress is taking a serious toll on him. He stays late at the office trying to catch up on all the new technology and jargon he now has to deal with and even sleeps in his office rather than going home to his family. Ultimately he ends up sacrificing more than any of the other characters in order to get the project finished and takes full blame for [[spoiler: getting Cameron to hack into the bank and embezzling money to keep the company going]]. |
| 93 | ** Gordon is happy to have received a promotion but he soon learns that this means that he has to fire people, some of whom are his friends and neighbors. The stress of having the future of Cardiff Electric in his hands drives him back to drinking. |
| 94 | ** Donna and Cameron both learn that running a company and dealing with unexpected setbacks is a lot harder than it appears. |
| 95 | * CharacterDeath: |
| 96 | ** [[spoiler:Ryan Ray commits suicide by jumping out of a building in Season 3.]] |
| 97 | ** [[spoiler:Joe's father passes away between Seasons 3 and 4)]]. |
| 98 | ** [[spoiler:Gordon succumbs to his brain damage and dies of a stroke towards the end of the series]]. |
| 99 | * ChekhovsGun: At the beginning of season 3, Gordon is examining a portion of the floor at the Mutiny offices, clearly worried that it is structurally unsafe. At the end of season 3 (four years later in-universe), the floor finally collapses during a fight between Joe and Tom, and Joe falls into the basement. |
| 100 | * ChekhovsGunman: Donna's boss, Hunt Whitmarsh, shows up outside her house for no apparent reason. The reason is explained at COMDEX. |
| 101 | * ChronicBackstabbingDisorder: |
| 102 | ** In Season 1, Joe definitely had a case of this. |
| 103 | ** In Season 3, Cameron accuses [[spoiler:Donna]] of being this. |
| 104 | * TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong: |
| 105 | ** Brian Braswell, one of Gordon's engineers, keeps pointing out problems with the various designs Gordon has proposed, and Gordon ends up firing Brian. Gordon's action is somewhat justified by the fact that while Brian had valid concerns about Gordon's proposals, he was never shown to actually suggest any solutions. On a project like this, the company cannot afford to have naysayers bringing the project down. |
| 106 | ** In "[=NeXT=]", Tom makes many valid points why starting a project centered on the World Wide Web (which during 1990 was an obscure technology used by a few European academics) is a bad idea. Anyone reading this wiki knows just how wrong he is. |
| 107 | * ComicallyMissingThePoint: |
| 108 | ** When Gordon, frustrated after Joe's dreaming keeps piling more and more engineering problems onto the design, that the name Joe came up with, the Contrail, is stupid, he sarcastically suggests calling the computer the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant Cardiff Giant.]] Joe (begrudgingly) accepts the name, apparently not getting the reference. |
| 109 | --->'''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' When we unveil the Contrail and it looks like this, people will be falling over themselves.\ |
| 110 | '''Gordon Clark:''' Wait, the what? \ |
| 111 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' The Contrail. We're calling it the Contrail. I'm announcing it this week, so don't tell anyone.\ |
| 112 | '''Gordon Clark:''' The "Contrail"?! You're naming it after the exhaust that comes out of the back of a plane?! \ |
| 113 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' It's about soaring, leaving the competition in the dust, which is exactly what this design can accomplish.. \ |
| 114 | '''Gordon Clark:''' No, Joe! Contrail ''is'' the dust! Look, if we continue to put form ahead of function, we're gonna be the ones left behind with everyone laughing at us. I mean, why don't you just call it the "Cardiff Giant"?! |
| 115 | ** After Yo-Yo goes through a stud with a circular saw, Lev complains that they've just lost the security deposit on their house, and Donna reminds him that they said goodbye to that a long time ago. |
| 116 | * ConsummateLiar: Joe lies to everyone about his intentions. Often someone will call him out on a lie and Joe will pacify him/her with another lie. It seems he is unable to stop himself from "selling", which in his case means exaggerating the truth. |
| 117 | * CoolCar: Joe's Porsche 944 at the beginning of the series, which he eventually has to sell. In the final episode, he's bought a similarly sporty Lotus Esprit, [[BaitAndSwitch teasing]] a return to his former self. |
| 118 | * CoolOldGuy: John Bosworth, despite being a generation older than the coders and having no knowledge of computer science, eventually earns their respect, and they bestow upon him the nickname "The Bos." |
| 119 | * CrazyPrepared: Ken Diebold, a major investor and senior executive at [=MacMillan=] Utility, knows about Joe's destructive past at IBM, Cardiff Electric, and Westgroup, and thus, he has both a non-compete clause and a "Joe [=MacMillan=] clause" written into Joe's contract; in the case of the latter, if Joe commits any destructive act against [=MacMillan=] Utility, Joe loses ''everything'' in the company. |
| 120 | * [[invoked]]CreatorCouple: In-universe, Gordon and Donna created the Symphonic and later the Giant. Gordon invites Donna to come work at Cardiff Electric as the head engineer; however, she declines his offer [[spoiler:deciding to work with Cameron at Mutiny]]. |
| 121 | * CueCard: Invoked by two guys trying to sell the Protonix [=OccasionMaster=] dot-matrix printer. Its biggest selling points are bidirectional printing and being able to print graphics, but the people trying to sell it at COMDEX read their sales pitch directly off papers they're holding, which leaves a lot to be desired. Additionally, Gordon and Joe, in a clever double-team effort, manage to sink the demo by asking the salesmen about the specs, which are not great, and pushing them to [[TooIncompetentToOperateABlanket demo the printer]], which eats the paper and kills any interest in the revolutionary new tech[[note]]Being able to print graphics legitimately ''was'' a neat feature at the time, though[[/note]]. Seven years later, the two apparently haven't learned anything from the disaster of the [=OccasionMaster=], using the same inept tactics to sell their new printer, the [=SPrinter=], and Joe and Cameron basically {{troll}} them during their sales pitch ForTheLulz. |
| 122 | * CrypticBackgroundReference: References are made to the events that caused Joe to leave IBM, but Joe avoids the topic and the IBM executives seem to be saving that information as future ammunition to use against him. All we know that as a result, a 2 million dollar data center was destroyed and Joe dropped off the radar so completely that his former bosses thought he might have gone and killed himself. Hunt, Donna's former boss, shines a little light on the mystery. Apparently, Joe got in a fight with his father and in retaliation opened a water main into the data center. |
| 123 | * DavidVsGoliath: |
| 124 | ** In season 1, Cardiff Electric vs IBM. |
| 125 | *** Lampshaded by Joe when he points out that IBM might have an army of lawyers to send after them, but Cardiff's legal argument is so sound that their single in-house lawyer will be able to beat them in court. |
| 126 | ** Deliberately invoked with the Slingshot, a competing computer built specifically that it would be able to slay Cardiff's Giant before Cardiff can even get close to competing. Subverted when Joe [[spoiler: sacrifices Cameron's operating system]] and is thus able to "dodge the bullet" that Slingshot fired at them. |
| 127 | ** In season 2, tiny startup Mutiny vs giant multinational oil company Westgroup Energy after the latter hijacks the former. |
| 128 | ** In season 4, Joe and Gordon's Internet Service Provider company has to face off against America Online which is aggressively expanding into their territory. Later, it becomes Joe's and Gordon's new independent search engine Comet vs Donna's VC-backed Rover. |
| 129 | * DeathByIrony: A corporate example. Donna takes a rather limited search algorithm for medical data and turns it into Rover, a Google-like internet search engine. When [[spoiler:Yahoo emerges on the market]], however, her firm is forced to sell it for scrap to a company who wants to use it to search their medical data. Donna finds this grimly hysterical. |
| 130 | * DeliberateValuesDissonance: |
| 131 | ** In the season 1 episode "Adventure", when Cameron finds out that she's being demoted to remedial assignments Lev retorts by saying "Welcome to the short bus," a dated term towards special education students. This being the 1980s, it was common to make such jokes. |
| 132 | ** Joe has to live as a closeted bisexual man in the 1980s. He lashes out at one company stakeholder who feels comfortable making sadistic and homophobic jokes about AIDS. |
| 133 | ** Haley is a closeted lesbian in the mid-90s, though the fact that [[spoiler:her mother and Cameron seem to have no problem with it suggests that she probably won't have difficulty coming out to her family]]. |
| 134 | * TheDiseaseThatShallNotBeNamed: Joe has a meeting with the head of General Atomics to apologize for his son getting doing cocaine at one of Joe's lavish parties before getting into a car wreck. The man eventually mentions that the San Francisco engineers have "soft handshakes" (i.e., they're gay) and that he hopes the "special flu" (HIV) running around will "take care of them". Joe is less than pleased. Later, one of Joe's gay ex-lovers reveals that he is sick, and Joe takes it very seriously. The trope is finally averted when Joe takes an HIV antibody test. |
| 135 | * DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: Although Joe's career in season 3 is based on John [=McAfee=], he affects a "zen visionary" persona, heads a large company, and tends to wear black shirts and wireframe glasses, all of which make him strongly reminiscent of Steve Jobs. Because Steve Jobs exists in this world, it seems intentional on his part. |
| 136 | * DrinkBasedCharacterization: After IBM raids all of Cardiff's customers in season 1, Joe starts talking to venture capitalists despite Bosworth's misgiving. John eventually sets up a meeting with Nathan Cardiff to talk money, and Bosworth gets them all drinks. Scotch whiskey for Boz and Cardiff, but his "guess" for Joe? [[WineIsClassy White wine]]. |
| 137 | * DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:Faced with the choice between a year in prison and a five year ban from computers or becoming a fugitive and losing the NSFNET regional network he worked so hard on, Ryan [[TakeAThirdOption takes a plunge from Joe's balcony]].]] |
| 138 | * DyingDream: [[spoiler: In "Who Needs a Guy", Gordon hallucinates watching his family go back in time, first seeing Donna at her current age, then a younger Donna with their two daughters as young children, then Donna as a young mother holding baby Joanie. And then he dies]]. |
| 139 | * EnsembleCast: The show gives prominence to its five main characters; however, Season 1 focuses more on Joe and Gordon with their efforts with the Giant, and Season 2 focuses more on Cameron and Donna and their efforts with Mutiny. |
| 140 | * EveryManHasHisPrice: |
| 141 | ** Cardiff Electric loses more than 68% of its revenue after IBM aggressively undercuts their mainframe business. Even clients who have been with the company for years cannot turn down the amazing deals IBM is offering to lure them away. |
| 142 | ** Averted when IBM offers Cameron triple the money she is getting at Cardiff, but she ends up turning them down. |
| 143 | ** When it seems that Cardiff Electric and the Giant are done for, Joe accepts his father's offer to come back to IBM in exchange for heading IBM's new portable computer project. However, [[SubvertedTrope Gordon and Cameron manage to persuade Joe to see the Giant project through]]. |
| 144 | * TheFellowshipHasEnded: The show repeatedly has the same cast of characters joining up and splitting off from each others' various enterprises. |
| 145 | * FinaglesLaw: "Up Helly Aa" has a series of these for Cardiff Electric; however they manage to overcome them. First, the team learns that they don't have a suite or exhibit space; however, Gordon successfully hatches a scheme to get a room and booth space. Afterwards, the Giant malfunctions, but Joe distracts convention goers with booth babes while Gordon and Donna repair the Giant. Finally, Cardiff learns that another upstart company led by Donna's ex-boss Hunt had plagiarized the design of the Giant. With modification to the Giant, Joe successfully pitches the machine [[spoiler:at the cost of Cameron's original vision for the Giant]]. |
| 146 | * FireForgedFriends: Pretty much the whole cast is at each other's throats a lot of the time, but they all ultimately care deeply about each other. |
| 147 | * FiveFingerDiscount: |
| 148 | ** Cameron uses a trick quarter to avoid having to pay for arcade games in "I/O", and shoplifts several shirts in a mall clothing store in "FUD". |
| 149 | ** In "Landfall", Gordon shatters a toy store window in order to get two Toys/CabbagePatchKids dolls. |
| 150 | ** After Cameron buys two Chinese counterfeit [=XTs=] from a fence, she pickpockets the keys to his van. At first, Cameron was going to take back her money; however, Donna discovers two genuine [=XTs=] still in their boxes. Hustling the hustler, Donna and Cameron steal the real [=XTs=] and dump the knock-offs on the fence. |
| 151 | * ForegoneConclusion: While the cast are always on the bleeding edge of the digital revolution, we know that none of their enterprises will become major players without pushing the show into a AlternateHistory. This is perhaps most obvious in the final season, when Joe and Gordon chart a very similar path for Comet as Yahoo would eventually take, and we know how that turned out for Yahoo. Gordon is particularly interested in optimizing their site for Netscape, a browser that was infamous killed by Internet Explorer. Even Donna's Google-like Rover dies on the vine when when [[spoiler:the real Yahoo shows up and seizes control of the early search market]]. |
| 152 | * {{Foreshadowing}}: In "I/O", set in 1983, Joe asks Cameron what will be true about computers 10 years from now. She responds by stating that computers would be connected over one network using a standard protocol. In the final season, set in 1993, Cameron's prediction had come to fruition. |
| 153 | * FreudianTrio: Cameron, Gordon, and Joe are the Id, Superego, and Ego, respectively. |
| 154 | * GamerChick: Cameron is a huge video game fan. A big part of her clash with Donna at Mutiny is that Cameron is more interested in making games, while Donna wants to turn Mutiny into an online community. She later becomes a celebrated video game designer and programmer, but she's more interested in using games as artistic expression than the player having fun. |
| 155 | * GeorgeJetsonJobSecurity: |
| 156 | ** After IBM raids Cardiff's customer base, Gordon is forced to lay off several employees. |
| 157 | ** Driving home one evening, Gordon's coworker and neighbor Brian runs a stop sign and gets into a fender bender. When Brian [[NeverMyFault blames everyone but himself]] for the accident, Gordon fires him on the spot, [[spoiler: realizing that Brian was a weak link in the PC project]]. |
| 158 | ** When Cameron uses a text-based adventure game to weed out excess programmers, she states any programmer who ''didn't'' cheat in order to win the game was fired on the spot. |
| 159 | * GoodGirlsAvoidAbortion: Averted with the CloserToEarth [[spoiler: Donna arriving at a Planned Parenthood after anxiously receiving the news she's pregnant]]. |
| 160 | * GoingNative: GoodOlBoy John Bosworth starts out as extremely skeptical about the PC clone project but by the end he becomes its biggest proponent, even willing to [[spoiler: commit fraud and go to jail]] in order to get it completed. |
| 161 | * GoodOlBoy: Cardiff Electric Senior VP John Bosworth and company owner Nathan Cardiff are both hard nosed, conservative Texas businessmen who don't take kindly to Joe's risky, progressive East Coast corporate thinking. However, Bosworth eventually reveals himself to be much more open-minded and adaptive than he initially appears. |
| 162 | * HeroicBSOD: Cameron is the most common victim of these. |
| 163 | ** Cameron suffers one after her computer gets fried and her backup floppies get degaussed. |
| 164 | ** Cameron suffers another one during COMDEX after Gordon removed her OS from the Giant, and Joe sided with Gordon. |
| 165 | ** Cameron experiences a panic attack [[spoiler:after Gordon had inadvertently wiped out Mutiny's BBS with his Sonaris program]]. |
| 166 | * HeroicSacrifice: Bosworth takes responsibility for embezzling Cardiff's money to keep Cameron out of jail. |
| 167 | * HistoricalInJoke: Gordon jokes that his new digital watch is so advanced he almost expects he could check the weather on it, something that's possible on any modern smartwatch. |
| 168 | * HoistByTheirOwnPetard: Sick and tired of Atari refusing to release her game, Cameron decides to leak a copy to ''Electronic Gaming Monthly'' so they can finally tell the world what her game is like...and the review is absolutely horrible, making Cameron realize the game is going to bomb. |
| 169 | * HollywoodHacking: Averted, as the technology of the period is portrayed realistically. |
| 170 | * HollywoodLaw: Nathan Cardiff tearing up Joe's check at the beginning of Season 2 and threatening to drag Joe "in front of a jury" for his actions makes for a dramatic moment...but legally it's a useless gesture because the sale is complete and everyone's signed closing documents, which typically include an acknowledgement of receipt. If Joe signed proper closing documents like the other parties, the money is legally his and tearing up the cheque would just leave the entire sale and the company in a legal limbo due to the company still having funds it owes to Joe. If Joe had signed a document that forfeited the amount without knowing it, it would likely be unenforceable given the circumstances, and the other amounts given to the other shareholders would have to be amended to account for the funds he didn't get (ie Gordon would receive a share of the ~$600,000 Joe didn't get). Cardiff's lawyers would probably face professional sanctions either way, either for handing Nathan the cheque after Joe signed off on receiving it or for tricking him if they had Joe signing off the funds. Given Joe's personality it's possible he just doesn't care and wants to start over, but given his business experience he would be aware of this. |
| 171 | * {{Hypocrite}}: |
| 172 | ** Joe tells off a potential investor by stating that mediocrity and making a project about themselves are the two things that ruin a company. However, Joe's ego gets irrecoverably tied to any project he undertakes, and he is quick to abandon or destroy the project when Joe does not get the result he wants. Case in point, when the Giant project did not go as Joe wanted, especially after sacrificing Cameron's ambitious OS to defeat the Slingshot and seeing the Macintosh at COMDEX, he destroys the initial shipment of Giants and abruptly leaves Cardiff Electric. |
| 173 | ** Cameron is horrified when one of her programmers tells her that he has been accessing the private chat logs of the Mutiny users in order to catch a hacker who has been eavesdropping on private chat rooms. She tells him that it is a violation of their Terms of Use and that he is never to do it again. Turns out that Cameron is the one who has been eavesdropping on the private chat rooms. |
| 174 | * HypocriticalHumor: It turns out that the reason Bosworth doesn't want Cameron sleeping in the office is so she won't catch him doing the same thing. |
| 175 | * ICouldaBeenAContender: |
| 176 | ** This is a key element of the series. The characters get involved in various ventures in the computer industry in the 80s and 90s but they never become the industry leaders they were hoping to be. They come close but are ultimately eclipsed by their competitors. Sometimes it is due to the characters' own failings and other times it is just bad luck. A large part of their CharacterDevelopment is them learning to deal with it and move on to the next revolutionary idea. |
| 177 | ** Gordon was once a hotshot computer designer who created a revolutionary computer called the Symphonic. He tried to present it at COMDEX, but it failed to boot. After the project tanked, he was forced to take a lowly job as a support engineer at Cardiff Electric in order to support his family. The bitterness from the failure caused him to start drinking heavily and to neglect his family. Joe presents Gordon with a second chance to change the computer industry, and Gordon throws caution to the wind when he agrees to reverse engineer the IBM PC. |
| 178 | ** In the beginning of season 4 Joe and Cameron spend three years developing a web browser that would put them at the forefront of the Internet Information Revolution. However, Cameron has other priorities and the project is delayed. By the time she finishes the program, Mosaic has been released and makes their browser largely obsolete. |
| 179 | * IHaveAFamily: Gordon tries to use this to convince Joe that reverse engineering the IBM PC was a terrible idea, ''especially'' after Joe intentionally tells IBM about the project. |
| 180 | * INeverSaidItWasPoison: Cameron meets with one of the Mutiny users to trade some game peripherals and tells him that she is sorry about the death of the guy's son. He thanks her for her concern but then realizes that he never told her about it. He only discussed it in private chat with other members of a bereavement chat group. Cameron has been reading the private chats of Mutiny users and the guy is extremely angry when he realizes what has happened. |
| 181 | * IdealistVsPragmatist: |
| 182 | ** In Season 1, Joe is the Idealist while Gordon is the Pragmatist. Joe wants to develop an innovative IBM PC clone that would be twice as fast at half the cost; however, Gordon points out that the industry moves in increments, with the next product either faster or cheaper than the preceding product. |
| 183 | ** In Season 1, Cameron is the Idealist while Gordon is the Pragmatist. Cameron believed that the Giant should be more than a "glorified calculator", whereas Gordon has to sacrifice Cameron's ambitious UI in order to make the Giant economically viable; in Gordon's words, "We had a ''problem''. Now we have a ''product''". |
| 184 | ** In Seasons 2 and 3, Cameron is still the Idealist while Donna is now the Pragmatist. In Season 2, Cameron makes several unilateral business decisions with short term gain without thinking about long term ramifications much to Donna's chagrin, who had been secretly paying Mutiny's bills to keep the company afloat. |
| 185 | * ImagineSpot: When Donna and Cameron playfully "recall" their company Phoenix, a corporate neon sign materializes above their heads. When their flight of fancy ends with the death of the company, the sign sputters, shuts off, and vanishes. |
| 186 | * ImpliedDeathThreat: Nathan Cardiff tells Joe that if he doesn't follow through on the PC project, there ''won't'' be another job for Joe because no one would be able to find where he'd be buried. |
| 187 | * ImpossibleTask: |
| 188 | ** When Joe reveals his plan for Cardiff's PC to Gordon and Cameron, building it with twice the speed at half the cost of the IBM PC, Gordon tells him that the industry moves in increments, stating that the next product is either faster or cheaper than its predecessor, not both. |
| 189 | ** When Joe reveals that the new Cardiff PC would be portable and weigh less than 15 pounds, the engineers scoff at him. |
| 190 | ** When Joe wants Mutiny to port their programs to UNIX to get a reduced network rental rate, the coders see it as such. While actually porting Mutiny to UNIX is not outright impossible, it is a difficult and time-consuming task, time which Mutiny does not have and cannot afford to lose at $5 per hour, causing them to resort to trickery in an attempt to get the reduced rate right away, as described below. |
| 191 | * IncompetenceInc: |
| 192 | ** Cameron's Mutiny company has elements of this. Because there's no clearly defined hierarchy, Cameron's workers bicker amongst one another and half of Donna's job seems to be trying to keep the lid on lest the company fall apart for electrical code citations or because their own BBS can't handle the volume of calls, or Cameron's own refusal to ride herd on her smart but argumentative workers. In season 3, Cameron insists on writing key sections of code by herself. This results in the company CEO working herself into exhaustion for days while her employees sit around doing nothing because all their projects cannot start without that code. |
| 193 | ** Swap Meet was started by two talented programmers who had a good idea and the ability to turn it into a working product. However, they seem to have little managerial or business sense and are clearly out of their depth. As a result they are desperate to sell off their company. When Bosworth comes to visit the Swap Meet offices to finalize a buyout, their employees are lethargic and it seems that no one was actually assigned to answer the phones. |
| 194 | * InsufferableGenius: Ryan Ray is a brilliant new programmer for Mutiny and notices that some hackers have been reading private chats, but his abrasive manner means that most of his coworkers don't take him seriously. [[spoiler: In Episode 2 of Season 3, he goes to Joe's company.]] Later, Ryan releases the source code of a key program online to the masses. Joe freaks out that Ryan just broke federal law but Ryan scoffs the Feds will never find them, saying "I'm that good." The next episode opens to the feds pouring over Ryan's house with one guy using a special device to check his computer. |
| 195 | -->'''Ryan''': There's nothing there. |
| 196 | -->'''Hacker''': Yeah, that's what I said when they came after me too. |
| 197 | * IntergenerationalFriendship: Joe and Haley develop a close bond during their time at Comet. He's notably the first person to figure out that she's gay. However, after Haley is going through some rough times, she spitefully tells Joe that it's weird for him to treat her like a friend when she's only a teenager. In the end, however, [[spoiler:Joe writes her a very warm letter that she appreciates. Hers is one of two photographs on Joe's desk in the final episode]]. |
| 198 | * ItsAllAboutMe: |
| 199 | ** Gordon believes that reverse engineering the IBM PC, and later actually building the Giant, was solely for Joe's benefit. |
| 200 | --->'''Gordon Clark:''' There is no "we", Joe. \ |
| 201 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' There is now. I was at COMDEX two years ago. I saw the Symphonic demo. It was ahead of its time. That was then, this is now and a year from now, you're gonna thank me. You're a builder, Gordon! \ |
| 202 | '''Gordon Clark:''' No, I'm not, okay?! Not anymore. |
| 203 | ** Joe's father lampshades Joe's tendency to fall into this trope by pointing out that massive corporation like IBM is not going to start a multimillion dollar portable computer project just to get back at Joe. The project was started independently by another IBM division who are probably not even aware of Joe or Cardiff Electric. |
| 204 | ** Cameron's reaction when Gordon removes her operating system in order to make the Giant competitive with the Slingshot is all about Joe and Gordon betraying her vision for what the computer should be. She does not seem to care that it was the only way to save the project and keep Cardiff Electric in business. She would rather have the Giant fail then deviate from her vision. |
| 205 | ** A lot of Gordon's and Donna's marital problems come from Gordon taking this attitude. The failure of the Symphonic computer had just as big an impact on her as it did on Gordon but she is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to keep her family going. Gordon acts as if his life has lost meaning and allows his drinking to jeopardize his job. It is a sign of his CharacterDevelopment that at the end of the season he specifically tells Donna that she should do what makes her happy even if it means that she will not be working with him. |
| 206 | ** In Season 2, a lot of the problems within Mutiny are exacerbated because of Cameron's possessiveness over her creation and her vision for it. For example, Bosworth kicks a non-paying but very frequent game-player off the BBS, upon which she fails to grasp that the money is needed more than her attachment to the deadbeat's loyalty to the BBS. In season 3, Cameron insists that she is the only one qualified to rewrite key sections of code despite the fact that she has a dozen talented programmers who could do the job. While she struggles to do it all on her own, the company grinds to halt. |
| 207 | ** In Season 3, Cameron's possessiveness over Mutiny and its code continues to cause problems, particularly as Mutiny's native code is poorly documented and will not mesh well with the code being brought in from the purchase of [=SwapMeet=]. |
| 208 | ** In Season 4, Donna finds out one of her subordinates is pregnant. While the toast she makes ends with a very heartwarming message, it manages to be more about Donna's own past than about celebrating the occasion. |
| 209 | * ItsBeenDone: The key moment of the series finale is when Cameron and Joe are about to put up their big search engine model to win over the Net. As they look things over, they suddenly see [[spoiler: a newly named engine named Yahoo set up. While Cameron mocks the design, Joe sees it's already on the toolbar and realizes they have beaten Joe and Cameron to a search engine users will use.]] |
| 210 | * ItWillNeverCatchOn: |
| 211 | ** While exploring the COMDEX show floor before the Giant demo, Cameron thinks that [[Platform/MicrosoftWindows Windows]] looks cool, but Donna tells her it was crawling with bugs, and Joe was impressed with HP's "touch screen" technology, but Gordon calls it a fad. |
| 212 | ** Cameron sees the potential of networking and multiplayer gaming while everyone else is lukewarm, so she leaves to start Mutiny. |
| 213 | ** Tom Rendon comes to a meeting among Cameron, Gordon, Donna and Joe, and is the naysayer of the meeting, insisting that open source software[[note]]The term would only be applied to software toward the end of the decade, even though the GNU Project was well-known among computer people. GCC and GNU Emacs were already in wide use among developers, even before the Linux kernel appeared. Such software was known at the time as "free software" or "freeware."[[/note]] will never be viable and that the potential of the Internet to help unleash the potential of such software is wildly overstated. [[spoiler:It's hinted that he's partly being purposely truculent because he suspects Joe and Cameron of having had an affair.]] |
| 214 | ** Gordon mocks the name "America Online," saying it sounds like the title of a Music/NeilDiamond song. This later bites him in the ass when AOL expands to California. |
| 215 | * {{Jerkass}}: All of the main characters are jerkasses in their own way. |
| 216 | ** Joe [[ManipulativeBastard manipulates]] those around him in order to advance his goals. |
| 217 | ** Gordon often neglects his wife and daughters in season 1, often due to Joe's ambitions, a habit that Donna embraces in season 2 onward. |
| 218 | ** Cameron's rebellious and free-spirited nature often clashes with her more straight-laced coworkers. |
| 219 | ** Ryan Ray at Mutiny is clearly smart, but doesn't mesh well with his co-workers (whether due to his social awkwardness or because of latent racism towards him is unclear), partly because he has a habit of not explaining himself well and because he talks down to people. |
| 220 | * JerkassHasAPoint: |
| 221 | ** Joe is a ManipulativeBastard, but he is correct that they can break IBM's stranglehold on the industry. In turn, the people who call him out on his actions are acting jerkish, but are fully justified in their anger. John Bosworth outright states that he is going to make the team's lives miserable, but their actions jeopardized twenty years of his life's work and threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of Cardiff employees. In "Adventure", he strongly hints that Gordon should follow his lead when dealing with the Japanese. [[spoiler:Gordon fails to take the hint because of his own issues vis-a-vis Joe.]] |
| 222 | ** In season 3 a reporter writes an article where he criticizes Mutiny and predicts that the company will fold in less than two years. Cameron and Donna are angry at the reporter but acknowledge that he is essentially right and that in its current form Mutiny has peaked. They have nothing unique that differentiates them from their bigger rivals and if they start losing users, their overhead costs will bankrupt them. |
| 223 | ** Ryan Ray has legitimate concerns about the unpatched security holes at Mutiny, and about the adaptability of software in an era where it couldn't be taken for granted that even a basic computer could offload graphics processing to a dedicated add-on card. |
| 224 | ** In "[=NeXT=]" Tom consistently naysays everyone's ideas and is a complete ass to Joe. However, all his points are very valid and the other characters are mature enough to acknowledge this. |
| 225 | * KickedUpstairs: In Season 3, the board at [=MacMillan=] Utility [[spoiler:strip Joe of his authority after he essentially tries to turn the company into an early ISP.]] |
| 226 | * [[invoked]]KillerApp: At Mutiny, Cameron originally believed that her episodic fantasy game ''Parallax'' was the service's killer app; however, Donna's Community chat rooms becomes this. |
| 227 | * KnowWhenToFoldEm: |
| 228 | ** Donna and Hunt finally convince TI management that the Platform/TI99 is a lost cause, though Hunt says that the company has been thinking of dropping it for months. |
| 229 | ** Nathan Cardiff is fully prepared to close the company down once it runs out of funds and is vehemently opposed to the idea of putting more of his money into it. Averted with John Bosworth, who is determined to keep the company going no matter what he has to do to accomplish that. |
| 230 | ** Surprisingly, of the main trio, it is Joe who gives up first when it looks like the Giant will never make it to COMDEX. |
| 231 | ** In "SETI" Nathan Cardiff sells off Cardiff Electric when it becomes clear that the Giant Pro is not going to be a runaway success and the company has plateaued. |
| 232 | ** When Joe and Cameron get an advance copy of Netscape and see that Netscape has partnered with Yahoo, Joe pulls the plug on Comet. |
| 233 | * LensFlare: Used in one Season 4 scene to indicate [[spoiler: Gordon's dying visions]]. |
| 234 | * LoopholeAbuse: |
| 235 | ** Joe and Gordon use reverse engineering to recreate the assembly language code of IBM PC BIOS. The duo might have gotten off scot-free had Joe not deliberately told IBM about the project. |
| 236 | ** After Cardiff is committed to the PC clone project, Joe attempts to have their BIOS designed in a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design clean room environment]] in order to appease the lawyers for both Cardiff and IBM; however, Cameron's rebellious and free-spirited nature makes this difficult. |
| 237 | ** Donna tries to invoke the same Chinese wall method of rewriting Rover's search algorithm [[spoiler:after she discovers Cameron had wrote it. Diane orders Donna to simply buy Cameron's source code]]. |
| 238 | * LooseLips: |
| 239 | ** Gordon and Donna have been calling Cameron white trash in front of their daughters. When she finds out, she's not exactly thrilled about it. |
| 240 | ** Gordon's drunken attempt to shoot the breeze with a Japanese businessman almost costs Cardiff a deal with Kazoku. |
| 241 | ** Cameron eventually learns about Joe's [[spoiler:intentional sabotage of her BIOS work]] after Gordon vents about the FBI shutting down Cardiff. |
| 242 | ** Donna's boss is trying to pump her for information about Cardiff's computer project. While she claims not to told him anything, he still manages to piece enough to [[spoiler:start his own company and rip off their design to built his own computer for COMDEX]]. |
| 243 | * ManipulativeBastard: |
| 244 | ** Joe manipulates everyone around him to get his project off the ground. When they realize what is going on, they call him out on it, but have no other choice but to join him. |
| 245 | ** Donna's boss Hunt seems like a nice guy but turns out to have manipulated her so he can steal Cardiff's design and build a competing computer. |
| 246 | * MeaningfulName: |
| 247 | ** [[BrandX Ranger soda]] is a nod to the Texas Rangers law enforcement agency and the UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball team of the same name. |
| 248 | ** The engineers dub their design lab the "Kill Room", after one engineer jokes about how they are likely to kill each other before the machine is finished. |
| 249 | ** Cameron christens her BIOS "Lovelace", after Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer ''ever''. |
| 250 | ** Gordon originally suggested calling the new Cardiff PC the Giant as a joke, naming it after the infamous 1869 [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiff_Giant Cardiff Giant]] hoax. Joe then [[ComicallyMissingThePoint unwittingly accepts]] Gordon's suggestion. |
| 251 | ** The Slingshot deliberately plays on the DavidVsGoliath imagery to position itself to slay Cardiff's Giant by demoing ahead of the Cardiff team and thus being able to end the fight before Joe can mount an attack. |
| 252 | ** Cameron names her company Mutiny, since many of her coders defected from Cardiff Electric. |
| 253 | ** Tabula Rasa, Gordon's counter-program for Sonaris, literally means "clean slate" in Latin. |
| 254 | ** Cameron and Donna fantasize about naming their next company Phoenix, because it rises from the ashes of their previous falling out. |
| 255 | * MissingStepsPlan: |
| 256 | ** It quickly becomes apparent that Joe only has vague ideas about how to proceed after he gets Cardiff Electric to start designing a PC clone. His ultimate vision is to revolutionize the personal computer industry and dethrone IBM, but he does not yet know what Cardiff's computer should really be like, and more importantly, does not know how to convince people to buy it. |
| 257 | ** Cameron has put a lot of ambition into Mutiny; however, she lacks the foresight to keep the venture viable for the long haul. She often relies on short term "patches" to fix the company's problems. |
| 258 | ** Joe had another one of these in the works, as he's reconfigured Westgroup's mainframes "off the books" to entice other people to buy computer time when they aren't in use. |
| 259 | * MoodWhiplash: Joe is having a business meeting with an important investor whose son crashed a car after taking drugs at one of Joe's parties. The guy seems like a ReasonableAuthorityFigure and a concerned parent who simply wants assurances from Joe that such an incident will not happen again. Joe makes all the necessary apologies and the two man start chatting about surfing and the work the investor's company does for the Defense Department. Joe seems to be on the verge of an EurekaMoment when the investor out-of-the-blue starts a homophobic rant, clearly not aware that Joe is bisexual. Joe goes from friendly to TranquilFury in a second. |
| 260 | * MortonsFork: Joe puts Cardiff Electric into this situation. If they fire Joe and Gordon, it will be seen as an admission of guilt and IBM will sue them into bankruptcy. If they do not fire them and instead claim that they are legitimately building an IBM clone, they will have to invest millions into the technology and then try to compete against a pissed-off IBM, which will most likely bankrupt the company. Their only sliver of hope is that Joe is right and their new computer will be able to successfully compete with IBM's PC. Fortunately, Joe's gamble pays off where the Giant turns enough profit for Nathan Cardiff to cede control of the company to Joe and Gordon. |
| 261 | * MultipleChoicePast: Joe has given several different explanations for the scars on his torso, none of them true. [[spoiler:The story of him falling off the roof after being taken up there by his mother is the true one, since Joe and his father both obliquely mention that incident.]] |
| 262 | * {{Nepotism}}: |
| 263 | ** Joe's father is implied to be a powerful executive at IBM. His influence is big enough that, even after everything that Joe has done, IBM is willing to hire Joe back if he just walks away from the PC clone project. |
| 264 | ** Joe is widely viewed within Westgroup as having only been hired because his soon-to-be father-in-law is the President of the company. |
| 265 | * MyOwnPrivateIDo: In Season 3, [[spoiler: Cameron and Tom Rendon elope.]] |
| 266 | * NiceJobBreakingItHero: |
| 267 | ** Gordon and Donna are a little bit incautious talking about Cameron, and it gets back to her. [[spoiler:Being as Cameron doesn't always have great impulse control, this nearly backfires on them until by chance, Gordon's neighbor shows up, intoxicated and armed with a gun.]] |
| 268 | ** In "The Way In", Gordon develops a program which can trace Mutiny's inbound calls and users and try to figure out how many people are really logged in as opposed to freeloading off multiple logins. [[spoiler:It ends up eating the BBS's files, and because the software is proprietary akin to Compuserve's, it also gets across to the client computers and rewrites their disks as well, at the very least nuking the BBS software and forcing a mass mailout of new disks.]] |
| 269 | ** Cameron decides to leak her game to a magazine so they can finally get a review out and thus pressure Atari into releasing it. She's shocked when the review calls the game a total mess and thus pushing it from an unreleased gem to a disaster. |
| 270 | * NoHonorAmongThieves: Cameron and Donna have no problem stealing a fence's genuine [=XTs=] they happen to find in his van after he delivered them a couple of Chinese knock-offs. |
| 271 | * NonResidentialResidence: In the first season, both Cameron and Bos are secretly living at the Cardiff Electric offices, the former because she's homeless and doesn't have the money for an apartment, and the latter because he's a workaholic who's avoiding his family. |
| 272 | * NoOSHACompliance: |
| 273 | ** Cameron's "Mutiny" company is semi-permanently on the verge of being cited for electrical safety violations because they need so many computers to handle the volume of incoming calls to their BBS. Also, in "SETI", Yo-Yo walks down the hallway with a ''live circular saw'' in order to open the walls to put more cabling in. |
| 274 | ** Mutiny's new California office does not seem to be structurally sound, especially after a minor earthquake. |
| 275 | * NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup: Played with. Due to Cameron's unprofessionalism, she nearly loses all of her work when her hard drive gets fired, and she believes that her backup disks got degaussed; however, Donna and the Cardiff engineers manage to recover and reconstruct more than 90% of the BIOS code. As Donna later finds out, Cameron's work was never really lost as Joe had the real backup disks, and he had engineered the whole crisis in order to get publicity for the Cardiff PC. |
| 276 | * NoSell: When meeting with potential investor Louise "[=LouLu=]" Lutherford, Joe finds her offer ludicrously low and hates everything about her. He gives her a highly insulting ReasonYouSuckSpeech in order to wreck the business deal. However, [=LouLu=] simply ignores Joe and instead addresses John Bosworth who she knows has the actual power to close the deal. Nathan Cardiff later lampshades the fact that she has been called much worse and she never lets insults interfere with a business deal. Joe still manages to sink the deal by [[spoiler: making out with her boyfriend]], which actually gets under [=LouLu=]'s skin. |
| 277 | * NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity: [[invoked]] In-Universe. |
| 278 | ** In "Close to the Metal", Joe brings in a reporter from ''Wall Street Quarterly'' do to an article about Cardiff's PC while Cameron was in crisis mode after losing her BIOS code. [[spoiler:Of course, Joe intentionally sabotages Cameron's work in order to have said article written.]] |
| 279 | ** In "The 214s", after Cardiff Electric is shut down by the FBI for an embezzlement scandal, Gordon tries to convince Joe to not abandon the Giant project by stating that people at COMDEX will be curious to see the trainwreck that is Cardiff. |
| 280 | ** At the end of season 2, Joe is blamed for the fiasco at Westgroup which means that he is pretty much unemployable in the computer industry. He decides to use the bad publicity to form his own company that would protect other companies from the very thing he is accused of doing. He raises millions in venture capital. |
| 281 | * NothingButHits: The soundtrack is used to denote the time period, though the songs aren't always the most famous of the era. |
| 282 | * AnOfferYouCantRefuse: |
| 283 | ** This is practically Joe's ''modus operandi''. After deliberately telling IBM that he and Gordon reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS, he forces Bosworth and Cardiff into one of these: either enter the PC business or get sued out of business by IBM for copyright infringement. |
| 284 | ** Tom tells Cameron that he managed to get multiple users on a single phone line; however, he explicitly refuses to reveal how he did it unless she hires him on at Mutiny. |
| 285 | * OhCrap: |
| 286 | ** Everyone in the room when Joe reveals that he was the one who informed IBM that they reverse engineered their proprietary BIOS. |
| 287 | ** This is Gordon's and Cameron's reaction when they see the army of lawyers that IBM has sent to deal with their little "project". Joe is unfazed since he was fully expected this reaction from his former bosses at IBM. |
| 288 | ** The morning before their COMDEX demo, the group is taking some time off to enjoy the convention and pick up some free t-shirts when they come upon the Slingshot demonstration. They instantly realize that they are screwed and that the Giant might be dead-in-the-water before they even have a chance to demo it. |
| 289 | * OnceDoneNeverForgotten: Gordon and Donna are still remembered for their failed Symphonic demo at COMDEX. |
| 290 | * OneHitWonder: [[invoked]]Gordon feels that the Giant was one for him and Cardiff Electric, calling its follow-up, the Giant Pro, a less inspired version. |
| 291 | -->'''Gordon Clark:''' Second machine was a lateral move; less inspired... \ |
| 292 | '''Joe [=MacMillan=]:''' The Pro wasn't that bad. \ |
| 293 | '''Gordon Clark:''' "Not that bad." We should've put that on the box. |
| 294 | * TheOner: The Season 2 premiere features an impressive tracking shot that follows Donna as she wanders through Mutiny headquarters, trying to make sense of the chaos. |
| 295 | * OpenSecret: Cameron and Tom try to keep their relationship a secret from the rest of Mutiny, but the coders have figured it out and stage a fake emergency just so they can make fun of Tom as he scrambles out the window of Cameron's bedroom. |
| 296 | * PacManFever: Justified, since the series takes place in UsefulNotes/The80s, and later UsefulNotes/The90s. Unlike most examples of this trope, the games' actual graphics and sound effects are used. |
| 297 | ** In "I/O", Cameron plays a VideoGame/{{Centipede}} arcade machine. |
| 298 | ** In the flashback scene of "SETI", Joe and Cameron play a round of ''Indy 500'' on an Platform/{{Atari 2600}}. Also, the Mutiny crew have a rather extensive collection of Atari 2600 games. |
| 299 | ** In "Extract and Defend", Joanie and Haley are playing a prototype version of ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' their granddad brought home from Japan. Gordon and Cameron later tackle the game in "And She Was". |
| 300 | ** In the Season 4 opener, teens are hooked on ''Franchise/MortalKombat''. |
| 301 | * PeriodPiece: The show is set in the personal computer boom of the early 1980s and later the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Each episode has a specific time-frame in which it took place, with some episodes coinciding with RealLife events. |
| 302 | ** The series starts just prior to May 25, 1983, as Gordon takes his family to see ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' and Joe and Gordon reverse engineer the IBM PC during the Memorial Day weekend. |
| 303 | ** "Landfall" takes place between August 15 and August 20, 1983, when [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Alicia Hurricane Alicia]] hit Texas. |
| 304 | ** "Giant" takes place sometime between September and early October 1983, as TI had announced it would drop the Platform/TI99 and exit the home computer business in October 1983. |
| 305 | ** "Up Helly Aa" takes place between November 28 and December 2, 1983, the dates of COMDEX '83. |
| 306 | ** Part of "1984" takes place sometime after January 22, 1984, as Joe had taped [[UsefulNotes/SuperBowl Super Bowl XVIII]] to show Gordon Apple's advertisement for the Macintosh. |
| 307 | ** "Extract and Defend" takes place sometime before September 13, 1985, as Donna's dad Gary had brought home an early run NES with ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' from his latest visit to Japan. Donna's mom says that it will be released in the fall. The NES was test-marketed in New York City, before being launched nationwide a year later. |
| 308 | ** The Season Three finale took place in part during mid-November 1990, the date of COMDEX Fall '90 |
| 309 | ** Season 4 takes place in 1994, when Yahoo debuts in the navigation bar of Netscape. |
| 310 | * PeripheryDemographic: InUniverse, Donna notices that a lot of Mutiny's customers are using the chat feature long after their games have finished. In season 3, they notice that many of their chat users are using the chat rooms to arrange trades of computer equipment and various memorabilia. |
| 311 | * PersonalHateBeforeCommonGoals: In season 3, Cameron and Donna allow their game company and their relationship to fall apart because neither of them can stand the other's vision for how to run the company. At the end of season 4, after competing with each other to put out the best search engine (and ultimately losing to Yahoo!), they finally reconcile. |
| 312 | * PoliceBrutality: Towards the end of "Close to the Metal", two Dallas County sheriff's deputies pull over Joe and [[NoHoldsBarredBeatdown savagely beat him]] and arrest him for no apparent reason. However, when Bosworth bails Joe out of jail, Joe realizes that the incident was arranged by Bosworth as a message to remind him who is in charge at Cardiff Electric. |
| 313 | * PlatoIsAMoron: Gordon calls UsefulNotes/SteveJobs a "megalomaniac who loves form over function", referring to the Platform/AppleMacintosh in the Season 1 finale and the [=NeXTcube=] in the Season 3 finale. |
| 314 | * PlayingGamesAtWork: The coders at Mutiny tend to spend more time playing games than actually ''developing'' games. |
| 315 | * PreviouslyOn: Each episode after "I/O" starts with a recap of previous events. |
| 316 | * PrizedPossessionGiveaway: Bos gives away his prized Mustang to his estranged son as a wedding present. |
| 317 | * ProchronicProduct: One episode sees the crew at Mutiny create a functional broadband network in the late 1980s, whereas in real life, broadband did not become widely available until a decade later. |
| 318 | * ProductPlacement: |
| 319 | ** Besides IBM, many real-world computer hardware and software companies of the 80s and early 90s are mentioned, including [[Platform/TI99 Texas Instruments]], [[Platform/AppleII Apple]], [[Platform/{{Commodore64}} Commodore]], [[Platform/TRS80 Tandy]], Microsoft, Digital Research[[note]]creators of the CP/M operating system, from which MS-DOS was derived[[/note]], Columbia Data[[note]]creators of the first IBM PC clone[[/note]], Compaq, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Xerox, Hewlett Packard, Creator/{{Atari}}, Coleco, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), [=CompuServe=], Oracle, Cisco Systems, [=NeXT=], America Online, Netscape and Yahoo. |
| 320 | ** In the first season, Gordon's wife Donna worked at Texas Instruments, and their two daughters are seen playing with a Speak & Spell, an educational toy manufactured by TI in the late 1970s and 1980s. |
| 321 | ** In the pilot "I/O": |
| 322 | *** Cameron is seen playing a ''VideoGame/{{Centipede}}'' arcade machine. |
| 323 | *** Gordon takes his family to see ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi''. |
| 324 | *** Joe hands Gordon a back issue of ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_(magazine) Byte]]'' magazine, an editorial magazine of the period which covered the microcomputer industry. Gordon wrote an article for the magazine on the topic of "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_architecture open architecture]]", and Joe reminds Gordon of this in order to motivate him into reverse engineering the IBM PC with him. |
| 325 | *** Gordon is seen drinking Dr. Pepper, a product invented in Texas. |
| 326 | ** In "FUD", while talking to Cameron, Joe's secretary Debbie mentions [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar WordStar]], a popular word processing application in the early half of the 1980s. |
| 327 | ** In "Landfall", Gordon is trying to find Toys/CabbagePatchKids dolls, a toy whose popularity was ''huge'' in the early 1980s, for his two daughters as the remnants of Hurricane Alicia make their way from Houston to Dallas. After paying $80 for a rock when a stranger claims he was selling a Cabbage Patch Kids doll, Gordon [[FiveFingerDiscount resorts to breaking into a toy store front window and stealing two dolls from a display]]. |
| 328 | ** In "Giant", Bosworth reads the September 5, 1983 issue of ''Newsweek'', which featured "the 414s" hacker group as the cover story. This inspires Bosworth to recruit Cameron to commit a copycat crime to keep the Giant project afloat. |
| 329 | ** While demoing the Giant at COMDEX, Joe mentions Microsoft's [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan Multiplan]][[note]]A precursor to Excel[[/note]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3]], both of which are early spreadsheet programs; the latter was the [[invoked]]KillerApp for the IBM PC and was a de facto benchmark for an IBM PC clone's software compatibility[[note]]Due to Lotus 1-2-3 being written in [[DifficultButAwesome x86 assembly language and addressing the video hardware directly]] rather than using DOS as a middle man[[/note]]. |
| 330 | ** At COMDEX, Joe wanders into a hotel room where the Apple Macintosh is being demoed for the first time... complete with ceremonial candles akin to a religious experience. |
| 331 | ** In "The Way In", Gordon struggles to open a can of Jolt Cola, a soft drink notorious for its caffeine content. |
| 332 | ** In "Play with Friends", Gordon is wearing an red Adidas tracksuit during his morning jog, while Cameron pounds some Good & Plenty candy before meeting with her coders. |
| 333 | ** In "Extract and Defend", Gary brought home a prototype Platform/NintendoEntertainmentSystem from his latest visit to Japan; Haley and Joanie play ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' on the system. Also, the Mutiny coders watch ''Film/TheTerminator'' on VHS. |
| 334 | ** In "Heaven Is a Place", the August 5, 1985 issue of ''Fortune'' magazine, whose cover highlights Steve Jobs' firing from Apple, can been seen in a stack of business periodicals. |
| 335 | ** The NES is more prominently featured during Season 3, where Gordon plays ''VideoGame/DuckHunt'' in "Rules of Honorable Play", and Gordon and Cameron team up to beat ''VideoGame/SuperMarioBros1'' in "And She Was". |
| 336 | * PutOnABus: In "SETI", Cardiff Electric is liquidated, and thus all of the employees are laid off. |
| 337 | * PyrrhicVictory: Cardiff successfully develops the Giant and it becomes a sales success, but entering the PC business destroyed Cardiff's profitable mainframe division, and making the Giant profitable by junking Cameron's interface resulted in the creative programmers departing. This results in the Giant Pro being just like every other computer on the market, but being manufactured by a barebones company that can't compete. Despite the Giant's success, Cardiff has no other path but to sell itself for its intellectual property once the novelty wore off. |
| 338 | * TheQuincyPunk: Cameron meets with a group of these in an alley and later parties with them in a hotel room after cashing her first paycheck. |
| 339 | * ReasonableAuthorityFigure: John Bosworth comes of a jerk at first but he is under a lot of stress due to the mess that Joe created. It soon becomes clear that he hates laying off people and will do everything he can to save the company. He is willing to tolerate Joe because they need him to sell the project and is actually very nice to Cameron when he catches her rummaging through the empty offices after work hours. |
| 340 | * TheReasonYouSuckSpeech: |
| 341 | ** Joe tells off potential investor [=LouLu=] Lutherford after she offers a less than desirable deal to finance the Cardiff PC project, claiming that she rents her friends and makes her business decisions all about herself. |
| 342 | ** Donna berates Gordon for not keeping promises he made and not knowing enough about their own daughters. |
| 343 | ** Joe does this to Gordon in front of Gordon's fellow engineers after Gordon nearly sinks a deal with Japanese suppliers and then doesn't come to see Joe prior to announcing the LCD deal. It turns out that while Joe going to the Japanese to mollify them apparently restored the deal, Gordon did a lot of the heavy lifting at the cost of a lot of his dignity by going to his father-in-law the previous night, who helped save the deal. |
| 344 | ** Gordon tells Joe that him leaving Cardiff Electric to return to IBM is a betrayal of everything he ever stood for. |
| 345 | ** Cameron tells Joe that he is a "sad little boy with a lot of wasted potential". |
| 346 | ** In the season 3 finale, Cameron tells Donna [[spoiler:that she essentially failed a secret test of character when Donna all too handily agreed to dump Joe if "he was a problem", and Cameron then proceeds to point out that Donna has a tendency to run roughshod over people and toss them aside when they're inconvenient to her plans.]] |
| 347 | * RefugeInAudacity: |
| 348 | ** Joe manages to force Cardiff Electric into the computer business by openly telling his former bosses at IBM that he and Gordon were creating a clone computer, forcing Cardiff to claim that they had been working on their own computer all along in order to avoid a lawsuit. And Cardiff realizes that they can't fire [=MacMillan=] or Clark because that would tip off IBM that they knew that the computer project violated IBM's copyright. |
| 349 | ** Just after Cameron finishes writing the BIOS code, Joe deliberately fries her computer and convinces her that she's degaussed her backups, creating a crisis for the company, all so that he could get the Wall Street Quarterly to write a story about their computer. |
| 350 | ** Cameron takes a page out of Joe's playbook when she comes to believe that the new software team is mismanaged. She goes to her new boss and fires him and then she fires most of the programmers for NOT cheating in a video game. She then explains her reasoning to a bemused Joe who agrees with her and makes her the new software manager. |
| 351 | ** After Cardiff Electric is shut down by the FBI, Gordon hastily disassembles the Giant prototype, thinking that FBI agents would not seize "spare parts" as evidence. Later, he breaks into the office at night to steal the Giant's component parts, reassembling the computer at his garage. |
| 352 | * RunningGag: After the show moves to California, a lot of jokes are made at the expense of the native Texans' terror over California earthquakes. |
| 353 | * SanitySlippage: |
| 354 | ** The second episode reveals that, under his confident demeanor, Joe can be really unstable. It is implied that he suffered a nervous breakdown during his time with IBM. When it seems that his plan will fizzle out, he loses it for a while. He stops by a store selling hi-fi audio equipment and goes bonkers when a salesman tells him that the store is going out of business because customers do not want to buy the new technology the store is selling. In a succeeding episode, he enters a car crushing contest and it's clear if you look closely that he's using it as a way to take out all his frustrations. |
| 355 | ** The ending of "Giant" appears to be this for Gordon. |
| 356 | ** [[spoiler:Cameron]] has an outright emotional breakdown when she feels that she's losing control of Mutiny. |
| 357 | ** In Season 2, Gordon [[spoiler:finds out he has long-term brain damage from what the doctor attributes to exposure to vaporized heavy metals in solder for several years, and notes that Gordon may have exacerbated the problem with cocaine usage.]] |
| 358 | * ScarsAreForever: A tattoo example. In a very early episode, Cameron passes out at a punk party and wakes up to a man trying to tattoo the logo of Music/BlackFlag onto her upper arm. He only gets the outline of the first rectangle done before she pulls away. However, whenever Cameron's upper arm is visible throughout the rest of the series, that black rectangle is still there. |
| 359 | * ScrewThisImOuttaHere: |
| 360 | ** In "The 214s", after Cardiff Electric is shut down by the FBI, [[spoiler:Joe]] nearly abandons the Giant project, but is convinced by Gordon & Cameron to stay on. [[spoiler:However, in "1984", Joe torches the first shipment of Giants and abruptly leaves Cardiff Electric.]] |
| 361 | ** At the end of the first season, Donna deliberately gets herself fired from Texas Instruments as a way to appease Gordon for her indiscretions with her ex-boss Hunt. |
| 362 | ** When Donna and Cameron reveal that Mutiny cannot afford to pay the coders' salaries, most of the coders stay in exchange for shares in the company; however, Yo-Yo and Frosty are among those who walk out. |
| 363 | * SeriousBusiness: |
| 364 | ** Early on, the Symphonic for Gordon. However, this is no longer the case when he feels the Giant will succeed, declaring the Symphonic a "piece of shit" and destroys it in front of Donna. |
| 365 | --->'''Joanie Clark:''' What's a Symphonic? \ |
| 366 | '''Donna Clark:''' It's a silly computer Mommy and Daddy built that didn't work. \ |
| 367 | '''Gordon Clark:''' The Symphonic... was the best thing your dad ever did. |
| 368 | ** The Giant for Cardiff Electric. This is {{justified|trope}}, especially considering that the machine will ruin Cardiff Electric if it fails. |
| 369 | * ShapedLikeItself: When Joe asks Gordon what is the Giant's "[[invoked]][[KillerApp Lotus 1-2-3]]", Gordon responds with "it's 'Lotus 1-2-3'", reminding Joe that they built an IBM-compatible machine. |
| 370 | * ShownTheirWork: As with many AMC shows, the creators went through extensive lengths [[http://www.amctv.com/halt-and-catch-fire/videos/re-making-the-80s-halt-and-catch-fire to recreate the setting of the early 1980s]] as accurately as possible. |
| 371 | * ShoutOut: |
| 372 | ** The second episode's title "FUD" refers to IBM's notorious tactics of "fear, uncertainty and doubt". |
| 373 | ** The eighth episode's title, "The 214s", is a direct reference to the real life 414s hacker group. |
| 374 | ** The ill-fated commercial for the Giant Pro invokes the tale of "Literature/JackAndTheBeanstalk". |
| 375 | ** In "The Way In", Gordon calls Mutiny a "[[Franchise/ANightmareOnElmStreet Nightmare on Nerd Street]]". |
| 376 | ** Haley's room includes posters of Music/TheyMightBeGiants, ''Film/DazedAndConfused'', and a Creator/GildaRadner comedy special. |
| 377 | ** The [[spoiler:last]] book that Gordon reads is ''[[Literature/LonesomeDove The Streets of Laredo]]''. Joe has it in his office in the final scene. |
| 378 | * SinkOrSwimMentor: Joe loves to put people in situations where they have to use all their potential to succeed while failure would ruin their lives. He does this to Cardiff Electric by forcing them into the PC Clone business and he keeps doing it to Gordon and Cameron almost OnceAnEpisode. |
| 379 | * TheSociopath: By the first season finale, it's clear that Joe is one. His ego is irrevocably tied up in being personally attached to any project he undertakes, and when he doesn't get what he wants he will either abandon it or destroy it rather than see it done. Additionally, his obvious glibness and ability to "turn on a dime" if it means he can keep people in his orbit renders him fundamentally unstable and, as Nathan puts it, a "rattlesnake", not to be trusted. In Season 3, [[spoiler:Joe shows another facet of socioopathy, the chameleon-like ability to 'reinvent himself'. He sports glasses and a beard, and in a speech he makes before an audience, he radiates almost grandfather-like warmth even as he boldly positions his company to gain massive market share by giving away the consumer-level version of his antivirus product.]] |
| 380 | * SockPuppet: Lev falls victim to one on the Community forum; a gay user he was conversing with turned out to be fake, and Lev was beaten by a homophobic gang. |
| 381 | * SpottingTheThread: Towards the end of "FUD", Cameron realizes that Joe's story about getting his scars after some bullies chased him off the roof for not fitting in was bullshit because the two historic events central to his story[[note]]Sputnik and the 1958 NFL Championship[[/note]] actually happened about a year apart rather than happening that same week. |
| 382 | ** Joe pulls this off on Cameron in turn "10Broad36" when he wants to raise the price of Munity's time-share to what he charges other companies, but agrees to only increase it by 50 cents an hour if they add more features to the BBS and make a port of it for UNIX [=PCs=]. While Cameron agrees with his demands, the time spent to program the UNIX port at the raised prices would drive Mutiny to bankruptcy, so she and the rest of the team set up an elaborate mock UNIX PC with a C64's guts to run a custom version of Mutiny and fake the modem connection to other users by streaming data from another computer via a coaxial cable, planning to create a proper UNIX port later. Unfortunately, he figures out the ruse when he notices that the chess program only knows a single opening even though he's supposed to be playing against other users and that the fake machine is already overheating from just a few minutes of use because Cameron didn't think it needed to function any longer than that and they didn't have the time to implement any cooling solutions. Joe is still impressed by their ingenuity and after witnessing the trick with the coaxial cable, which would latter be better known as an Ethernet cable, he tells his boss that Westgroup should aim to aquire them. |
| 383 | * StylisticSuck: The commercial for the Giant Pro, seen in "SETI". |
| 384 | * SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: |
| 385 | ** In a span of an afternoon, IBM is able to steal more than 68% of Cardiff Electric's business. Pissing off a giant corporation has repercussions. |
| 386 | ** Joe might have a grand vision of selling a computer that can compete with the IBM PC but it is up to Gordon to actually build the thing. Soon the project is running into immovable barriers like the Laws Of Physics and solving one issue only leads to more problems. Increasing the speed also increases the heat generated by the components. An innovative solution to deal with the heat problem would make mass production difficult and make the costs of the final product too high. No wonder Gordon starts drinking again. |
| 387 | ** At the beginning of the series Gordon is already in a fragile mental state. The enormous stress from being in charge of the designing and building the new computer pushes him way over the edge and he finally snaps at the end of "Giant". |
| 388 | ** COMDEX is a big reality check for everyone. A competing product rips off their ideas and the Giant seems to be dead even before it can be demoed for the first time. Joe has to sacrifice his and Cameron's vision for what the Giant could be, in order to beat the competition. Dona's flirtation with her boss turns out to have dire consequences for the project and for her marriage. In the end, Joe discovers that while he and the Cardiff team fought to beat IBM, Apple developed the Macintosh and changed the computer landscape forever. |
| 389 | ** The Giant Pro is a technologically worthy successor to the Giant, but a bad marketing campaign dooms its chances of ever being a top competitor in the PC market. |
| 390 | ** Cameron's Mutiny is quite successful as a pioneer in online gaming but without a vision for the future it is on the verge of collapse. Cameron's anarchic and seat-of-the-pants management style creates a great creative environment but their infrastructure is shoddy and unreliable and their sales are plateauing as a result. In season 3, they manage to fix the biggest technological and management problems but realize that it just means that they are plateauing at a slightly higher level and there is no way they can beat their bigger competition like Compuserve. They need to expand into new areas or they will go into a decline that will put them out of business. [[spoiler: After a TimeSkip to 1990, we find out that Mutiny shut down sometime in 1988. It was unable to compete and the investors shut it down rather than hemorrhage more money.]] |
| 391 | ** If you are buying computer equipment at night from the back of some guy's van for a fraction of their retail cost, don't be surprised when the computer parts turn out to be counterfeit. |
| 392 | ** Donna and Cameron ignoring Ryan Ray, clearly one of the smarter people at Mutiny, and not cracking down on harrassment from his co-workers in addition, is coming back to bite them as Ryan purposely decides to change jobs and work for Joe [=MacMillan=]'s company. |
| 393 | * SwissCheeseSecurity: The programmers who made the games for Mutiny's BBS didn't follow basic security precautions (e.g. leaving in backdoors), and so because the BBS host machines are accessible by computers other than a closed internal network, they easily fall victim to game hacks of various kinds that slow the whole system down. [[spoiler:And it's revealed in Season 3 that the holes were never actually patched properly, since it's possible to hack private conversations between two users.]] |
| 394 | * TakeThat: |
| 395 | ** Cameron calls IBM's BIOS code "garbage" without having to look at it. |
| 396 | ** Cameron notes how ugly and clunky the first generation of Yahoo is. The only reason they win the browser war (to that point) is because they finagled their way into Netscape's nav bar. |
| 397 | * ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: IBM sends a veritable ArmyOfLawyers to Texas as an intimidation tactic and to show how many resources IBM is willing to throw into the fight. Only the executives and senior lawyers actually talk and the rest are there to just glare menacingly. It's lampshaded when Joe's former IBM boss has the lawyers leave the room when he is talking to Joe. He knows that Joe will not be intimidated by the lawyers. The next episode Joe throws this back at them by bragging that Cardiff Electric only needs a single lawyer to win any lawsuit from IBM. |
| 398 | * TaughtByExperience: The main characters all start as idealists who believe that with one brilliant idea they can change the world. Their struggles with the Giant and with Mutiny taught them to be more pragmatic. In the season 3 finale they are presented with a new idea that could revolutionize computing. They all see the potential but are are very cautious. They keep reminding each other that the technology is in its infancy and that they "are early". They decide to start small and build from there. |
| 399 | * TechnologyPorn: As a period piece about the technology industry, there are lots of vintage computers in the show. The series is popular with retrocomputing enthusiasts for this reason. |
| 400 | * ThisIsUnforgivable: |
| 401 | ** Just before IBM's legal counsel shows up at Cardiff, Bosworth tells Joe that he's not going to forgive him for putting 22 years of hard work in jeopardy. |
| 402 | ** At COMDEX, [[spoiler: Donna lashes out at Hunt when he and her neighbor Brian unveil their Giant knockoff, the Slingshot.]] |
| 403 | ** Nathan Cardiff blames Joe for dozens of people losing their jobs [[spoiler:after Cardiff Electric is liquidated]]. |
| 404 | * ThoseTwoGuys: |
| 405 | ** Lev and Yo-Yo, Cameron's software programmers and housemates. |
| 406 | ** The awkward printer salesmen at COMDEX in Season 1 and Season 3. They're incompetent but so earnest that you root for them. |
| 407 | * TechMarchesOn: Invoked, played for nostalgia, and featuring characters who have a role in making it do so. |
| 408 | ** Cameron's OS for the Giant required a full megabyte of RAM, the maximum the Intel 8088 could address; even then, the IBM PC and XT used a maximum of 640 kilobytes of RAM, due to the design of [=PC-DOS=]. |
| 409 | ** In "SETI", Lev complains that Yo-Yo's version of Backgammon takes up too much storage space at over 500 kilobytes. |
| 410 | * TechnicianVersusPerformer: Frequently brought up. Gordon and Cameron are tech-heads, while Joe and Donna are primarily concerned with business application. Joe in particular is all about vision and salesmanship, and the other three criticize him for not knowing all that much about technology. He eventually studies hard to catch up, but [[spoiler:in the end he becomes a humanities professor, revealing that his heart was never in tech]]. |
| 411 | * TimeSkip: |
| 412 | ** Season 1 takes place over a period of nearly ''ten months''. "1984" spans nearly three months; the episode starts about one week after COMDEX in early December, Cardiff Electric receives its test shipment of Giants sometime after [[UsefulNotes/SuperBowl Super Bowl XVIII]] in late January, and Gordon holds the Giant launch party in late February[=/=]early March. |
| 413 | ** Season 2 takes place one year after the events of the Season 1 finale. |
| 414 | ** The Season 3 finale skips ahead several years to the fall of 1990. |
| 415 | ** Season 4 skips ahead again to 1993. |
| 416 | * TitledAfterTheSong: |
| 417 | ** "Working for the Clampdown" is named after the song by Music/TheClash. |
| 418 | ** The Season 2 finale, "Heaven Is a Place", is named for the lyric in the Music/TalkingHeads' "Heaven". |
| 419 | ** "One Way or Another" is named for the song by Music/{{Blondie|Band}}. |
| 420 | ** "And She Was" takes its title from another Music/TalkingHeads song. |
| 421 | * TooUnhappyToBeHungry: In "Goodwill", Joe spends a day in a deep depression over [[spoiler:Gordon's death]], and snaps at Bos when the latter tries to offer him some food. Bos has to trick him into tasting the spice level of some chili to get him to eat. |
| 422 | * TookALevelInJerkass: In season 4, the [[spoiler:recently divorced]] Donna has become more confident, aggressive and merciless. Toward the end of the season, she says that her college-age self would be eaten alive by the woman she is now. Gordon counters that she's not as mean as she thinks she is, nor was she as innocent as she remembers. |
| 423 | * TraumaButton: Cameron meets Joe [=MacMillan=]'s father, Joe Sr., and they actually get along for a while... until Joe Sr. says that Cameron must make her own father very proud. Cameron lost her dad when she was only 10 years old, and the mere mention of him upsets her so badly that she retreats into another room to cry. |
| 424 | * UnconfessedUnemployment: After Todd and Cameron have lunch with his mother, he reveals that she had recently been laid off from her job as a paramedic but wore her uniform anyway. |
| 425 | * TheUnreveal: In her very last scene, Donna glances around the diner where she's paying her bill and has a EurekaMoment. She rushes outside to tell Cameron that she's just had her next big tech idea... but the scene cuts away before she says what it is. |
| 426 | * VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory: |
| 427 | ** Although it exists in the same universe as another company, Cardiff Electric parallels Compaq's rise in the computer industry; however, Compaq was a startup company created in 1982 by former senior managers from Texas Instruments whereas Cardiff was an already established company manipulated into the PC business by an ex-IBM sales executive. Like Compaq getting acquired by Hewlett-Packard, Cardiff Electric too ends up getting acquired by another company; however, Compaq lasted nearly two decades before getting acquired by HP whereas Cardiff lasts only two years as an independent PC company. |
| 428 | ** The Cardiff Giant was inspired by early "laptop" computers, such as the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-5000 Sharp PC 5000]] the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavilan_SC Gavilan SC]], and the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Compass GRiD Compass]], all three of which ran MS-DOS and used either the Intel 8088 or 8086 processor[[note]]however, despite having similar specs to the IBM PC, the three machines weren't 100% IBM PC compatible[[/note]]. The Giant's case design was based on the Gavilan SC, and the display apparently used the same resolution as the Compass, albeit the Giant used a liquid crystal display whereas the Compass used an [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroluminescent_display electroluminescent display]]. |
| 429 | ** Mutiny is based on the real life [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayNET PlayNET]] service, which also ran on the Commodore 64 and existed at the same time as Mutiny in-universe. When Cameron meets with Jacob, he compares Mutiny to [=PlayNET=]; however Cameron tries to deny the comparison. In real life, [=PlayNET=] was forked into Quantum Link, which was eventually succeeded by AOL. |
| 430 | ** Mutiny would later evolve into an avatar-based virtual community similar to ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) Habitat]]'' by Creator/LucasArts and Quantum Link. |
| 431 | ** Gordon's program Sonaris is similar to the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm Morris worm]], a program that attempted to gauge the size of the Internet that got out of control due to a programming error. However, Sonaris predates the Morris worm by three years. |
| 432 | ** Gordon wanting to directly sell built-to-order [=PCs=] out of his garage is similar to the story of Michael Dell. In 1984, Dell sold custom built [=PCs=] from his University of Texas dorm room before dropping out to focus on his company, then known as [=PC's=] Limited, full time, which eventually became one of the largest multinational OEM computer manufacturers. |
| 433 | ** Joe's Season 3 venture, [=MacMillan=] Utility, is based on [=McAfee=] Associates, and predates the real world software company by two years. |
| 434 | ** [[spoiler: Ryan Ray]] is similar to Aaron Swartz: a young, idealistic programmer who frees copyrighted material only to be DrivenToSuicide while facing jail time under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. |
| 435 | ** In the Season 3 finale, Joe, Donna, Gordon, and Cameron (with Tom tagging along uninvited) get together and out of their fractious debates and arguments forms the nucleus [[spoiler:for something similar to the actual formation of Mosaic (later Netscape).]] |
| 436 | ** In season 4, the fight between Rover and Comet mirrors the fight between Lycos (or AltaVista) and Yahoo. Rover focuses on intelligent search results and a streamlined presentation to get users to their destination quickly. Comet focuses on categorization and becoming a hub for users, like Yahoo. |
| 437 | * ViewersAreGeniuses: Characters use actual computer science, electrical engineering, and information technology concepts and terminology. |
| 438 | * WackyStartupWorkplace: The show repeatedly deconstructs the Wacky Startup Workplace. |
| 439 | ** In season 2, Mutiny basically has a frat house atmosphere where employees are encouraged to play video games and come up with radical ideas for their own games, but the company is one disaster away from bankruptcy and a significant amount of most of its employees are secretly being underpaid while founder Cameron pockets most of the profits. |
| 440 | ** In season 3, Mutiny gets new investors and many of the employees mistakenly believe that this means they can party even harder, but in reality, the investors end up staging a coup, ousting Cameron, and forcing Mutiny to launch an IPO, where it gets eaten alive. Within a year or two, Mutiny is all but dead. |
| 441 | ** In season 4, Comet has a considerably smaller dark side, as co-founder Gordon Clark [[spoiler:knows that he's dying and just wants to enjoy his final days doing what he loves with similarly-enthusiastic geeks, but after his death, the company becomes obsolete after the advent of Netscape and Yahoo!.]] |
| 442 | * WasItReallyWorthIt: After Cardiff successfully pitches the Giant at COMDEX, the team contemplates this after Joe and Gordon had to sacrifice Cameron's ambitious operating system just to survive. |
| 443 | * WhamEpisode: Season 2 is basically a Wham Season. Season 3, not so much until the latter half. Still, there are some moments. |
| 444 | ** "Play With Friends" ends with [[spoiler: Donna confronting a positive pregnancy test]]. Gordon also collapses while installing the time-sharing options on Joe's mainframe. |
| 445 | ** In "Extract and Defend," [[spoiler: Gordon learns he has brain damage due to long term exposure to lead solder and other solvents as well as possibly his more recent cocaine usage. Sara also breaks up with Joe.]] |
| 446 | ** In "10Broad36," [[spoiler: Donna tells her mother she had a miscarriage. At the end of the episode, she and Cameron go to Planned Parenthood, presumably for Donna to have an abortion. Gordon also has a falling-out with his brother over an affair with an old girlfriend when he visits. Joe decides he wants to buy Mutiny after the stunt they pulled, because they managed to invent broadband technology with their ruse.]] |
| 447 | ** In "Working for the Clampdown", [[spoiler:Lev is hosptialised after he is attacked by homophobes.]] |
| 448 | ** In "Limbo", [[spoiler:"There is no Mutiny; it's gone" heralds the stealth conversion of Mutiny into [=WestNet=], with [=WestGroup=] essentially usurping the entire userbase and fooling most of them into thinking the name has just been changed.]] |
| 449 | ** In "And She Was", Cameron [[spoiler:moves out of the Clark household and gets her own place, upon which she reveals that she's married to Tom Rendon.]] Meanwhile, Joe [[spoiler:realizes he has no more options and admits that he stole the anti-Sonaris protection code from Gordon.]] |
| 450 | ** In "The Threshold", [[spoiler:Cameron leaves Mutiny when everyone sides with Donna in pursuing an IPO.]] |
| 451 | ** In "You Are Not Safe", when Mutiny's IPO goes live, [[spoiler:it trades well below expectations]], leaving Donna in shock and everyone else at Mutiny speechless. Also, Joe and everyone at Mutiny is in shock over [[spoiler:Ryan's suicide]]. |
| 452 | ** In the Season 3 finale, the timeline skips forward to 1990. [[spoiler: Gordon and Donna have divorced and Mutiny has gone under. Joe and Cameron have an affair.]] |
| 453 | ** "Who Needs a Guy?" [[spoiler: Gordon dies, enough said.]] |
| 454 | * WhamShot: At the end of "NIM" Joe finally read the memo Donna sent him. It's titled "World Wide Web". |
| 455 | * WhatTheHellHero: |
| 456 | ** Pretty much everyone calls out Joe for his insane stunt that put everyone's livelihood in jeopardy. |
| 457 | ** After Gordon's wife picks him up from the drunk tank, she gives him a major talking to about his self-destructive behaviour. She gives him another major one after she discovers what Gordon and Joe were up to over the weekend when Gordon was 'sick'. |
| 458 | ** Cameron quickly tells Joe off for assuming that she had sex with him in order to get a job. |
| 459 | ** Cameron tells off Joe and Gordon when she finds out that they intend to fire her after she finishes writing the BIOS code. |
| 460 | ** Donna gets in on the act after discovering that [[spoiler:Joe deliberately fried Cameron's computer to create a news story for the Wall Street Quarterly to drum up excitement for the Cardiff computer.]] |
| 461 | ** Joe yells at Gordon after the latter drinks too much during a business dinner and his inappropriate comments sink a deal with the Japanese. |
| 462 | ** Cameron is upset when Gordon strips out the daughterboard for Cameron's OS in order to beat the Slingshot. She gets even more upset when Joe goes along with Gordon's actions. |
| 463 | ** Joe is in shock when Ryan reveals [[spoiler:that he leaked the source code to [=MacMillan=] Utility's security software]]; Joe tells Ryan what he did was illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. |
| 464 | * WhiteCollarCrime: The main characters are both a perpetrator and a victim of white collar crime. |
| 465 | ** Bosworth is arrested and Cardiff Electric is shut down by the FBI [[spoiler:after Bosworth is accused of embezzling several thousands, if not millions, of dollars from Nathan Cardiff in order to keep the Giant project afloat. Cameron was the one who actually hacked the bank's mainframe; however, Bosworth [[HeroicSacrifice takes the heat]] to save her career]]. |
| 466 | ** After Cardiff is shut down by the FBI, [[spoiler:Gordon disassembles the Giant prototype and steals the components to keep it from being seized as evidence]]. |
| 467 | ** Cardiff Electric falls victim to corporate espionage [[spoiler:when Donna's former boss Hunt and Gordon's ex-coworker Brian unveil the Slingshot at COMDEX, which is a clear ripoff of the Cardiff Giant. Joe threatens legal action; however, Hunt rebuffs Joe's threat]]. |
| 468 | * WideEyedIdealist: Cameron believes that a computer should be more than just a glorified calculator. |
| 469 | * AWolfInSheepsClothing: |
| 470 | ** Nathan Cardiff refers to Joe as such, calling him a rattlesnake. |
| 471 | ** Donna's boss Hunt seems supportive of her at first; however, he was using her [[spoiler: to get information on Cardiff's PC project so he can produce his clone]]. |
| 472 | ** Joe finds out that [[spoiler:his future father-in-law is one. Joe had promised Mutiny that Westgroup wouldn't interfere; however, Jacob wanted to cut games development from Mutiny]]. |
| 473 | * YouAreBetterThanYouThinkYouAre: |
| 474 | ** After finding out that [[spoiler:Cameron was manipulated by Joe into thinking that she'd accidentally destroyed her own work]], Donna tells Cameron that her BIOS code is "like music". |
| 475 | ** Both Stan and Joe try to reassure Gordon that the Giant Pro wasn't as big of a failure as he makes it out to be. |
| 476 | * YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness: |
| 477 | ** Joe and Gordon were not-so-secretly planning to fire Cameron after she finished writing the BIOS code. |
| 478 | ** This essentially happens when [[spoiler:Westgroup uses its control over Mutiny's servers to boot Cameron off her own BBS, after repurposing it for their own ends.]] |
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