Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is the story of several tech workers in a tangled situation that was nevertheless normal in the 1980s and 1990s tech industry.

I won't spoil it, but if you are interested in what kind of things it depicts, for starters it tells a fictionalized version of how Compaq got started.

The name is a computer lore tidbit: Halt and Catch Fire errors, iirc, were errors that were spat up because your CPU's internal thermometer said it detected that the temperatures might literally make your PC catch fire if you do not terminate all programs immediately. This is less of a problem in 2025 than it was in the 1980s, but if you own a gaming PC then you can likely relate to finding out that you can't run a demanding game on insufficiently-cooled hardware by a sudden and abrupt shutdown.

Halt and Catch Fire in Glitch Techs x RP

The company in the show was "Cardiff Electric". Even though the real life Texas Instruments existed in the story, Compaq did not. Which is strange because Cardiff Electric is half-based on TI. The show was grounded and realistic, so don't expect much in it to entertain kids, but it's a neat look at how things in tech worked at the time.

Anyway, in the RP, Cardiff Electric went out of business around ~12003, to reflect the end of Compaq irl, but was apparently involved in collaborations and business agreements with Hinobi.