FUD

Halt and Catch Fire 1×2

& MacMillan: You tell the boys at Boca Raton they’ve written a nice BIOS here. It’ll be tough to beat. But rest assured, ours will contain no copyrighted material, Cameron Howe will be completely isolated in a clean room environment, she’ll have no contact with Gordon Clark or his reverse-engineering work. Any similarities in the code will be completely coincidental, just like Columbia Data... Just like Compaq... You know the legal loophole as well as I do.

& Gordon: Let me guess, you’re one of those idea people.
    Cameron: If by “idea people,” you mean I’m familiar with technology that wasn’t obsolete a decade ago.
    Gordon: Have you ever even touched a piece of hardware?.. See, that’s the problem with you entitled school kids. You’ve got a lot of fancy theories, but you’ve never actually been close to the metal.

& Cameron: I want to do something a little bit more than two times everything that everybody else is doing! Computers should have photo-realistic screens. They should have a million pixels and be self-learning and run expert systems. They should beat me at chess.
    Gordon: And maybe HAL can have human emotions, too, and steer the ship while we’re sleeping.
    Cameron: So we’re just building another boring beige box?

& Debbie: So, what is it that y’all are doing for us again?
    Cameron: Writing BIOS code. ... It’s “Basic Input Output Software.” It’s what first runs when you turn the computer on.
    Debbie: So, like WordStar?
    Cameron: So, BIOS boots the computer, which allows you to load the operating system and then you can run WordStar.
    Debbie: So I can write a little love letter to my boyfriend? That right?
    Cameron: Yeah... Something like that.

& MacMillan: I’ve only got two rules for our new PC division. One, let’s have a lot of fun. And, two... let’s make a lot of money, right? And if we get one and two right, well, we just might change the way people work, the way people live, and how they interact with each other. We just might put a ding in the universe, right?

---

& Gordon: Jobs, “ding in the universe.” ... Steve Jobs, the guy who runs Apple, he said that a few years ago.
    MacMillan: Yeah, I know. Isn’t it great?

& MacMillan: You’ve got a big day tomorrow.
    Gordon: Why?
    MacMillan: Well, tomorrow you start building tomorrow.

Boz Scaggs — Lido

♪ Lido missed ♪
♪ The boat that day he left the shack ♪
♪ Just long enough to grab a handle off the top ♪
♪ Next stop Chi-town ♪

Ω Oh, 1980s...
& MacMillan: This isn’t your playground, and contrary to what you might think, I know what code looks like, and this certainly isn’t code.
    Cameron: You’re right. No, you’re right. Yeah, this isn’t code. As you can tell. I’m trying to decide if we need to do this multiplication in order to align on octal boundaries. Now, my gut says, and I’m sure you’d agree, that we can do a shift-left-together three-bit-zero fill to the right, which is faster and gives the same result on the accumulator on the 186, but... I don’t know, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
    MacMillan: ...........

& Gordon: It’s all part of the plan. Tell me you have a plan, Joe..... Wow. Wow. You were just pretending. You’re like one of those guys who goes out and reads “Catcher in the Rye” too many times and then decides to shoot a Beatle. Only in this story, I’m the Beatle.

& MacMillan: Portability... People need to be able to take it anywhere. It’s going to have a handle.

& MacMillan: I was nine. There were some boys at my school who used to... chase me. I didn’t care about the New York Giants like they did. I cared about Sputnik. I was nuts about it. I was passionate. Nobody told me yet that adults are supposed to be ashamed of those feelings.

& MacMillan: Maybe we could do this precisely because we’re all unreasonable people and progress depends on our changing the world to fit us. Not the other way around. I want to believe that. I must believe that.

& Cameron: The game was December ’58. Sputnik came down almost a year before that.
    MacMillan: Is that right?

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On the IMDb

Σ Inspirational.