Halt and Catch Fire

The show is a fictionalized account inspired by the personal computing revolution of the 1980s and 1990s, but it is not a direct retelling of any specific company. The first season's plot about reverse-engineering an IBM PC BIOS to build a portable computer draws clear parallels to the real story of Compaq, though the characters and company, Cardiff Electric, are entirely fictional.

The series ran for four seasons on AMC, from 2014 to 2017. Each season jumps forward in time, beginning in the early 1980s with the PC boom, moving through the late 1980s with the rise of online services, then into the early 1990s and the World Wide Web, and concluding in the mid-1990s with the dot-com era.

The title refers to a class of fictional or humorous machine code instructions that, when executed, would cause a computer's CPU to cease meaningful function, sometimes metaphorically described as catching fire. It serves as a metaphor for the self-destructive ambitions of the characters throughout the series.

The core ensemble—Joe MacMillan, Gordon Clark, Cameron Howe, and Donna Clark—remains the focus throughout, though their relationships and professional partnerships shift dramatically each season. The show reinvents its setting and dynamics each year, moving from hardware to software to the early internet.