Halt and catch fire cast full#
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Halt and catch fire cast Pc#

“Yeah, yeah, the actors bring ideas, too! Because I thought that would symbolize something: ‘Donna, trust me on this.’ And it’s Gordon essentially trying to ground himself to the relationship, and not let the two of them separate.” “I asked Carl, ‘Can you be grounded to the ring?’” McNairy recalls. The montage’s real “grace note,” Cantwell says, is when Clark electrically grounds himself using his wedding ring, a subtle bit that is 100 percent technically accurate but wasn’t in the script. >He wasn't just in the wings-he was under the desk, controlling the lights on the bread board.

Halt and catch fire cast code#

Ledbetter also hand-fed preprinted pages of the final BIOS assembly code through the scene’s dot-matrix printer at a pace to match the device’s correct speed (as gleaned from YouTube videos).

Halt and catch fire cast Pc#

He was under the desk, controlling the lights on the bread board, a visual representation of the hexadecimal code Pace and McNairy’s characters are reading from the IBM PC ROM BIOS chip. Technical adviser Carl Ledbetter, an IBM senior lab director during the ’80s, was on set that day-and not just in the wings.

Halt and catch fire cast full#

The reverse-engineering montage was the most technically intensive, worked-over scene in the whole season and took a full day to shoot. It’s what the show’s other creator, Chris Rogers, calls Halt and Catch Fire’s 'version of Walt and Jesse cooking meth.' (One of the shows’ many Easter eggs: Gordon and Donna Clarks’ first initials and back story echo those of Gary and Dorothy Kildall, whose CP/M operating system was crushed by IBM’s introduction of PC DOS.) The “something great” that happens in the garage is when Clark and MacMillan reverse-engineer the IBM PC in the pilot. “Something great happens there in the beginning-but from there on out, what happens in the garage is a downward spiral.”Īt the onset of the series, Gordon Clark is a bitter sad-sack, having abandoned his dreams several years ago after the disastrous COMDEX unveiling of the Symphonic, an advanced computer he and Donna designed together. “For Gordon, the garage is like my carpentry shop, where I go to meditate,” McNairy says. The principal cast’s only actual Texan, McNairy has no tech expertise-he’d rather be fishing. A fishing-lure tattoo peeks out the left sleeve of his white V-neck.

McNairy has since put on his own Smith’s Auto & Truck Service camouflage cap. Costume designer Kimberly Adams allows that the character has “a bit of Wozniak’s flavor,” but says she sought sartorial inspiration from less iconic computer pioneers, like original MS-DOS author Tim Paterson. McNairy has rid himself of some of Gordon’s nerdwear, like his wire-frame glasses, though he’s still got on the dad jeans and the period-correct digital watch. (This isn’t the first time the two have worked together they also play husband and wife in Argo.) McNairy has just finished shooting a tense standoff with his onscreen wife Donna, played by Kerry Bishé, in the Clarks’ darkened garage. It’s a perfect, sunny March afternoon in Atlanta, and Scoot McNairy is hanging out with the crew in the parking lot of the onetime dog-food factory that currently serves as the Halt and Catch Fire sound stage. “We’re constantly making sure the verisimilitude of the show is as impervious as possible.” “Authenticity is huge for us,” says showrunner Jonathan Lisco. But the point is, the plot-and the stakes-should feel as real as possible to the viewer. And we won’t even know until the end of the 10-episode season (premiering this Sunday) whether MacMillan (Lee Pace, of the late ABC cult favorite Pushing Daisies), Clark ( Argo and 12 Years a Slave’s Scoot McNairy), and their colleagues are able to bring their cutting-edge tech to market, or if their dreams get crushed by industry heavyweight Big Blue. It’s the plot of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest prestige drama, set in Texas’ Silicon Prairie during the personal computer boom of the early ’80s.

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And let us not forget another duo, Joe MacMillan and Gordon Clark, who reverse-engineered an IBM PC in the garage of Clark’s Dallas home during a single weekend in 1983, setting their company Cardiff Electric on course to develop a portable PC twice as fast and half as expensive as anything then available. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (and, yes, Ronald Wayne) launched Apple in Jobs’ Los Altos, California, garage in 1976.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their company in one in Palo Alto in 1939. Few spaces are as hallowed in tech-startup lore as the humble garage.