Halt and Catch Fire

“Here’s something you might look at.” He dropped the magazine on my desk. When the boss offers a suggestion, it’s well to pay attention. I picked it up and glanced at the article he had earmarked.

“It’s the next big thing,” he said. “Multi-projector slide shows. We could do that.”

Newell Dodge had planted Royal Communicating Graphics in downtown San Francisco, right across the street from the giant Bechtel Engineering building, and sustained a profitable business providing them with fast blueprints and offset printed copies. He was always interested in new things that appeared in the trade magazines, even those that were on the fringes of our field.

This was 1970. The magazine piece, written by someone at Eastman Kodak, described a method of controlling a number of slide and movie projectors beamed at a giant screen timed by programs encoded on 35mm film strips. Each frame of the film strip contained a pattern of dots using the same coding that was punched into the familiar paper tape used by computers in the late 1960s. The tie-in to Kodak, of course, was that the coding appeared on film instead of punched paper tape. Rather than needing a computer to run the program, one could do the same operations with only a common film strip projector, then ubiquitous in classrooms all over the world. Projecting a pattern onto an array of light sensors, it could control the frame advance mechanisms of any number of slide and movie projectors.

 

Film-Strip Projector

 

Punched Paper Tape

 

“We have the paper tape punches and the photo developing lab to produce the film strips,” he said. His elderly voice was shaky, but his imagination impressed me. “Can you design an array of light sensors to pick up the code and send it to the projectors?”

I spent an hour reading the magazine article and sent a memo to Mr. Dodge. “Yes,” I wrote, “I can design a controller that uses relays to convert the code to commands to the projectors. I’m familiar with such circuits used in machine tools in factories.”

“Excellent,” he responded.

I had some doubts. I wasn’t an engineer, and I wasn’t sure how I would make this device. But he had challenged me, and that I enjoyed. Within a month I demonstrated a prototype of the system.

 

Fiber Optic Translation Component
to Convert Paper Tape code to Sensor Array for Prototype Controller

 

A few years later I remembered that project when I began to read about a new idea: making miniature computers using transistorized digital circuitry that had been developed for automated industrial equipment. Originating in Japan, programmable controllers based on microprocessors were inspiring would-be entrepreneurs to carry the idea into their garage-based laboratories, and soon the first “microcomputers” came into the market, attracting even more amateurs to computer programming.

Including me. I had read about computers but lacked the knowledge of transistors and circuitry that comprised a new distinct field in electrical engineering. When the Heath computer kit came on the market, I immediately bought one, built it and entered a wildly growing field.

 

My first computer system. The Heath H8 had a sloping front panel and an alpha-numeric keypad. The box at left contains two 5 ¼-inch floppy disk drives. My printer is shown in the corner behind the CRT terminal and keyboard.

 

The central processing unit (CPU) board inside the H8 computer. The CPU itself, an Intel 8008, is the white integrated circuit in the top corner. Memory in the H8 amounted to 8 KB.

 

The current Netflix TV series “Halt and Catch Fire” is the story of a fictional group of young people caught up in the 1980s promise of personal-sized computers. While the characters in the story are fictional, the environment is not. References to the early companies and products are threaded throughout: IBM, Texas Instruments, Commodore, Atari, and people such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the creators of Microsoft.

The core group in the story included two women who became major characters in the saga. Their personal and professional efforts met with challenges, successes and failures over more than the decade of the 1980s.

The series is not just a description of technical adventures. The main characters are rounded and believable. Their personal interactions constitute a large part of the drama, and over the course of four television seasons they all grew in maturity. A viewer didn’t have to understand all the ramifications of technological developments revealed in the episodes to follow the psychological challenges faced by the characters. But for me, that dual nature of the plot touched my own interests—both then and now.

 

Watching the series, I’ve relived an exciting time of my life. With my first personal computer, I embarked on a twenty-year freelance career writing, illustrating and publishing technical documents, magazine articles and proposals. Illustrations were all hand-drawn with pen-and-ink or were photographs of physical equipment.

My computers began with a couple of Heathkits, but eventually the needs of my business required the use of more sophisticated machines. I first used a specially-modified IBM Selectric typewriter as my printer, providing my clients with camera-ready pages of their publications. Later improvements in digital graphical representation allowed me to incorporate illustrations in the computer files themselves, that I could send directly to the clients or their printers.

I had begun my career in technical publications working for a company made up of writers, typists, artists, photographers and printers; I finished my career able to do all of it in my one-person office.

 

My second computer system: A newer Heathkit-Zenith with two built-in 5 ¼-inch floppy disk drives, separate monitor and keyboard. This computer ran on an Intel 8080 CPU and had 32 KB of memory.

 

My first printer. The IBM Selectric typewriter with extended carriage was modified to print directly from my computer. Replaceable type balls allowed various type fonts to be incorporated in printed documents.

 

Aside from my work as a writer, I spent countless hours in personal research. A public radio station had me design and build an emergency sensor component to alert their personnel if a part of their broadcast system failed.

WGUC-FM Ten-Channel Alarm Panel

 

I also created a computerized alarm system for my own office, with door sensors and a continuous logging program that told me what had happened while I was not present. For that, I obtained an old Commodore-16 computer and built interface components to connect it to the door sensors.

Commodore-16 computer

 

I was fascinated, while watching “Halt and Catch Fire”, to see the characters using components familiar to me in those days, such as the Commodore, as they fabricated their own computers. Indeed, I found the keyboard on the Commodore to be reliable and smooth-acting. The fact that its little computer nestled invisibly inside the case illustrated the rapid advances in technology during the 1980s. As interest in personal computers grew, their size shrank remarkably. For my “field computer” when I worked in clients’ offices, I used what I considered the first “laptop” computer, the Radio Shack Model 100.

 

Radio Shack Model 100 computer

 

I carried this notebook-size computer along with an equally miniature printer into clients’ facilities to write first-draft documents that I could leave with them for checking before I later provided them with finished, “camera ready” pages.

If clients needed photographs of their hardware, I was ready with a 4 by 5-inch sheet-film camera capable of producing professional images, even retouching the prints when needed to add graphics and text to the images. My early background in technical illustration gave me the ability to produce finished documents ready for printing.

Besides producing manuals, documentation and sales brochures for local clients, I wrote and illustrated articles for trade magazines, particularly several of the popular computer magazines of the time, such as Byte, Microcomputing and Creative Computing. Later, after I retired from commercial work, I used my experience to write and illustrate how-to-do-it articles for Model Aviation, the official magazine of the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

Drawing from an Model Aviation How-to-Do-It Article, 2001

Computers have been a part of my life ever since I built that first Heath H8; perhaps the very beginning was designing that multi-projector controller for Newell Dodge. The actual device was never completed, but my curiosity about the digital world began there. My wife and I have today seven operational computers in our home, not even counting our smart phones, which contain miniature computers that could easily have competed with the early IBM, Texas Instrument and Motorola machines.

 

“Halt and Catch Fire,” the title of the TV series, referred to an early computer instruction code (HCF) that caused a computer to enter an endless loop and become unresponsive to the operator. Originally said to be a test instruction in an early software design, the expression became a myth in the field. I believe that the television series demonstrated the never-ending process that the characters—and others—engaged in to develop newer and newer computer systems and software. That process continues to this day.