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Spoiler alert! This question (and, possibly, answers) could contain spoilers regarding "Halt and Catch Fire" TV series.

Background

I'm a web deleloper and do not have a CS degreee, so my understanding about hardware is at How Do Computers Work? level.

Question context

Here's a dialog from episode 102 between a hacker (Cameron Howe), which was hired by Cardiff Electric (fictional company) to write BIOS code via Clean room design, and an IBM lawyer (the story takes place in 1984):

Lawyer (passing to Cameron a binder with printed IBM's BIOS code): You were hired to write a replica of our BIOS code, but you won't be looking at our BIOS code.

Cameron: Look, I don't need to look at your BIOS, because I'm not interested in copying garbage. Sure, I might decide I want to spend the rest of my natural life waiting to move an instruction without a 16-bit bus, but other than that, I'm not looking at that binder.

Question

Does a phrase in bold have any meaning in real world, or it is just a fantasy of a screenwriter? AFAIK, it is related to a CPU architecture and not BIOS itself? If her task is to write a BIOS code, why she would be concerned about that?

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Nash Bridges
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2 Answers2

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Speaking as someone with extensive experience of low-level programming and some cpu architecture background, the phrase seems to be utterly meaningless in the context given. I therefore imagine it is simply technobabble, not intended to actually be understood by anyone.

Jules
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One of the things I like about that show is although it plays fast and loose with some historical details, it actually does a pretty good job at avoiding technobabble.

One of the main jobs of a BIOS is to load the operating system (move/load its instructions) from a long-term storage like a disk to be executed. Sometimes, especially back then, you had a mismatch between your processor's native word size (say 16 bits) and the size of the connection, called a bus, between the processor and the disk (say 8 bits). One way to speed up the transfer is to use a 16-bit bus, but that would make the hardware more expensive.

Cameron is insulting IBM's inefficient and inelegant way at which their BIOS programmers decided to handle that data transfer. She's scoffing at how slow their code is, and saying the only way she would look at it was if she felt like growing old waiting for their slow code to finish. She is saying they rely too much on expensive hardware rather than good programming.

The same theme comes up several times as she's working on the code. She thinks it can be done much more efficiently.

Karl Bielefeldt
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  • Yeah, the show did a good job with the tech. It would have been a lot more enjoyable, though, if they'd bothered to make any of the principal characters sympathetic. After a while you just end up mired in [Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy.](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarknessInducedAudienceApathy) – Mason Wheeler Oct 28 '15 at 20:18
  • Is she insulting IBM or really, Intel, who made this inefficient 8088 CPU architecture? – Warren P Oct 28 '15 at 20:59