I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.

There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..

Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)

This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.

The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe.

(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)

It was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.

When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.

This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.

One cool thing about this is that there are places where old compilers feared to tread, on the 6502 for example any opcode (apart from $A2, LDX #imm) ending in 2 would be a JAM instruction - CPU just stops. The later CMOS versions still did that for most of the $x2 instructions but some were converted to NOP.

So if you're implementing a 6502 in an FPGA, and you want to add (say) stack-relative addressing, there's a nice set of opcodes that you know won't ever be in conflict with the usual ones, because any 6502 ever issuing it would immediately halt (but not catch fire).

Complete series is at all time low on iTunes/Apple TV, 14.99:

https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594

Reading the post, I was immediately reminded of the Big Red Button that was a prominent feature on 80s/90 PCs because of their tendency to end up in a state where a hard reset was the only way out of the lockup. And of course there were the rare cases where even that didn’t work and the only solution was to power-cycle the machine. It’s been years, maybe decades since I’ve encountered that situation and when I have it was a hardware failure, not a software failure as was the case back then.

I'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.

So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.

This article subverted my expectations past the first couple of sentences. Nice read. The show is great too btw.

Love how many people here are thinking this is about (or just taking it as an opportunity to talk about) the under-appreciated TV show!

I had an old projector; If the film roll stopped for any reason (operator error, getting stuck, etc...), the lamp was so bright that it'd catch fire.

In the realm of flammable computer parts and adjacent devices, there's the somewhat related lp0 on fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire

I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article.

When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.

The Nintendo64 had a halt bug in the MIPS 4300. Doesn’t catch fire though.

The oldest reference I know of to "Halt and Catch Fire" is shown here : https://www.facebook.com/larry.langerholc/photos/d41d8cd9/74...

1960s era. Humorous instructions for the IBM 360/69.

If the image link doesn't work, I've OCRed it:

IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 69 FEATURES AND DEVICES

Early Card Lace

1401 Incompatibility

407 Emulation

Chinese Character Set

Branch on Burned-Out Indicator

Branch on Blinking Indicator

Branch and Hang

Branch on Chip Box Full

Branch on Power Off

Branch on Sleepy Operator

Inquire and Ignore

Reverse Parity and Branch

Branch on Bug

Read While Write While Ripping Tape

Add Improper

Divide and Overflow

Subtract and Reset to Zero

Add and Reset to Zero

Scramble Program Status Word

Pack Alpha and Drop Zones

Pack Program Status Word

Punch Invalid

Rewind Card Reader

Backspace Card Reader

Read Print and Blush

Forms Skip and Run Away

Stacker Select Disk

Write Wrong-Length-Record

Write Noise Record

Seek Record and Scar Disk

Eject Disk

Rewind Disk

Backspace Disk

Punch Disk

Punch Operator

Execute Invalid Op Code

Read Card and Scramble Data

Select Stacker and Jam

Read Invalid

Rewind and Break Tape

Write Record and Run Away

Make Tape Invalid

Reverse Drum Immediate

Transfer and Lose Return

Print and Smear

Read Chads

Sharpen Light Pencil

Transfer and Drop Bits

Erase Card Punch

Read Inter-record Gap

Read Noise Record

Erase Read Only Storage

Destroy Storage Protect Key

Update and Erase Record

Move and Drop Bits

Circulate Memory

Move and Lose Record

Move and Wrap Core

Move Continuous

Execute No-Op and Hang

Develope Ineffective Address

Halt and Catch Fire

Scatter Print

Re-initialize Meter

Update Transaction

Reduce Thruput

Print and Break Chain

Lose Message and Branch

Burst Selector Channel

Invert Record and Branch

Illogical "or"

Illogical "and"

Bite Baudy Bit and Branch

Triple-Pack Decimal

Slip Disk

Stacker Upset

Uncouple CPU's and Branch

Scramble Channels

Edit:formatting.

> I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire…

Go watch it. Great show.

I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).

There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me.

They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time.

I mean, wtf.

World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.

That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then.

Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.

Stories like these are what endear me to my chosen career.

I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…

This article is deadbeef on arrival.

That was definitely a defect of the monitor, not a serious mistake of the programmer. Any damaged monitor should have been paid by whoever had approved such a monitor design, even in the case of a monitor integrated in an all-in-one computer, which was not supposed to be disconnected from the computer.

I have also seen some monitors designed so badly, like the IBM MDA monitor mentioned at the link provided by userbinator, but all the TV sets that I have ever seen could only be synchronized to the desired scanning frequencies by the "sync" pulses, but they would oscillate freely in the absence of sync pulses.

The cost savings by not having relaxation oscillators or PLLs that would drive the raster scan in the absence of sync pulses, and which would limit the range of acceptable scan frequencies to safe values, have always been negligible, even by the time of the vacuum tube TV sets, and much more so by the time of computer monitors. The elimination of physical safety devices is not an acceptable way to reduce costs, especially when the savings are so small as in this case.

The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.

https://marc.info/?l=classiccmp&m=119637265107100

The more likely risk with a 6845 is creating a way out of spec vertical sync that can cause the monitor's frame flyback transformer to fail. Although how you describe the PET monitor's beam being "parked" suggests it's actually the same effect.

In 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked.

Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it.

Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!

I don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background.

Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.

It's a shame that it is such a niche show in practice. The acting of Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis in particular are so good across all 4 seasons.

I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.

Yeah a truly fantastic show all the way through the end. One of my favorites by far.

Same showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).

Agreed. This was one of the few shows that advanced the storyline quite a bit threw the seasons without jumping the shark.

I still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great

Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over.

Great intro too:

https://youtu.be/yD_kCKiSkoI

It really starts strong too. The first couple of episodes are fantastic.

> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.

Vladimir Horowitz very famously played a televised concert back in the 80s where, for the first time, a few cameras stayed focused closely on his hands. He had horrible technique. It was horrible by his own professed standard: for most of the fundamental things he himself taught to his students, he was doing the opposite! This was broadcast to millions of people. Piano teachers everywhere were pissed.

While that bad technique isn't particularly noticeable in the resulting sound for that concert, there's an analysis somewhere that shows the damage it did as he aged. You can hear certain problems he was having in his later recordings, and video from the same period confirms that the bad technique (like straining the wrist on octaves) was the culprit[1].

In any case, all kinds of world class people do all kinds of fucked up shit.

Edit:

1: In other words, when he was middle-aged he could play octaves accurately with a strained wrist, but he couldn't do that in old age. However, if he had been leveraging the weight/power of his entire arm for the octaves, he would have gotten accuracy in both cases.

2: IIRC, he didn't realize what his technique looked like until someone showed him the video. :)

At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.

You are looking for the wrong badge.

That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).

I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.

Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's. I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it. I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge. Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.

The only reason I learned to touch type was out of boredom and the fact that the only “game” for the TI99/4a system (it had an “extender” with floppy drive and ran some spreadsheet) that my dad brought home from work at weekends was a touch typing tutor. When I started CS, I was in the tiny minority in my class that could touch type. During an introductory lecture for the course, one of the tips was “learn to touch type”.

When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon

It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.

Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.

I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.

Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.

I didn't even notice that bit.

What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office.

I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field.

I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.

My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.

You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.

My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.

Typing was not a core skill. He had secretaries for that. A lot of the early typing he did was on a keypunch when an operator wasn't available; "proper" early mechanical keypunch technique was index fingers only because of the high forces involved.

My memories of the early 80's have a lot of "computer people" -- both older mainframe types like my dad, and younger people -- typing like that.

Mario teaches typing hadn't been invented yet!

My dad was a programmer in the 70s and 80s and, to this day, he types with both middle fingers and that's it.