Latest entry in my Excellent Media Experiences – introduction and complete index here. The most recent prior entry covered the arrival of cable TV.

Nobody misses the screech of a modem handshake, but everyone who heard it regularly remembers that it heralded connection to the world wide web, something genuinely new.

Earlier this month I re-watched Halt and Catch Fire which ran for four seasons on AMC between 2014 and 2017.

Critically acclaimed but lightly viewed, it begins in the Dallas/Austin technology corridor of the early ‘80s with a mercurial sales visionary named Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace), a gifted but adrift engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) whom Joe essentially rescues from his own inertia, and a brilliant young programmer named Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) who sees convention as the enemy. The story’s core turns out to be the relationship between Cameron and Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé), arguably the most complex character.

Halt and Catch Fire — AMC’s drama about the people who built the digital world before anyone knew what it would become.

The writing gets sharper every season. By years three and four, when the action migrates to the Bay Area and the subject shifts from hardware to online community, Halt is operating at a level that makes you wonder why seemingly no one was watching.

During those years — ‘95 through ‘99 — I was in Austin experiencing a distant-cousin version of what the series depicts, known at the time as “the new economy,” rife with digital careers and a local tech scene.

The Halt narrative captures that better than anything I’ve watched to date. 

(Two contenders come to mind, yet Halt outpaces both. Mike Judge’s HBO Silicon Valley deserves mention for its wonderful Office Space sendup of Bay Area tech culture; AMC’s current Audacity is unwatchable.)

The characters who inhabit this period piece are oddballs, obsessives and misfits. They’re seriously smart people building things that didn’t yet exist, an accurate reflection of those early web years.

Halt and Catch Fire understood these people: arrogant, idealistic, certain of what they were doing until IPO fever turned their vision into a land grab. 

We join the tale in the PC clone wars of the early ‘80s. The series’ production design is precise: beige towers, monitors with their slight curvature and faint greenish cast, the specific patience that dial-up required. 

The storyline I found most compelling is the early ’90s, when the show’s fictional Mutiny startup bets everything on online community — evoking CompuServe, the early BBS world, and early AOL.

Mutiny is a gaming and chat community struggling with what it’s actually for, eventually drifting toward something like a primitive eBay. The community forums, the user handles, how fiercely people identified with those spaces — the series gets all of it.

The browser storyline is where Halt crystallizes. Cameron and Donna clash over what the web should be, a medium or a marketplace.

When the characters move toward building a search engine, roughly 1996 in the timeline, series creators treat the outcome as unknown, because at the time, it was. No one at AltaVista, Excite, Lycos or Infoseek assumed they were building a central node of daily life. They thought they were building a better card catalog.

To its credit, Halt doesn’t romanticize this. There’s ample failure and bad decision-making throughout. But it understands that something was lost when builders gave way to monetizers.

Back in 1994, light years ago in the digital world, just getting online took effort — the modem, the wait, the dropped connection, the resistance built into every session that tech people would come to call “friction.” That resistance kept out the casually interested and rewarded the curious. You had to want to be there.

The social media mopes hadn’t arrived yet to optimize everything for outrage and steal the whole thing — and that loss is Halt’s real subject.

I wanted to be there too, I suppose. Thus my own ‘Excellent Media Experience’ version of all this was taking shape in Chicago in the early ’90s. We got dial-up first through the Chicago ISP suba, one of the early local operations that predated the national services. And we had CompuServe.

Alongside the digital setup, in 1992 I had acquired a one-year-used Pitney Bowes fax machine, a hulking piece of office furniture that occupied a corner of our northside apartment with the authority of an IBM mainframe. I ran a second phone line for it. I had an AT&T pager on my belt.

How very From The Future was I.

This was the infrastructure of my freelance communications practice. It felt like being early money on something. There was a technology optimism to these years that’s hard to reconstruct now but that Halt captures nicely. 

It’s the feeling of being young in your career and early to something that matters. 

What digital gave me was a side door into feature journalism. The traditional writer’s path then required the right J-school degree and a newswriting pedigree before anyone responded.

Email made that irrelevant. You found the editor and sent your pitch directly.

The prank-letters book I’d co-written with my brother Woody, Drop Us A Line Sucker!, opened doors, giving me something tangible to lead with when pitching.

Austin added cachet I hadn’t anticipated. In 1995, the city was its own credential. The music scene, the Dellionaires phenomenon coursing through the local economy, the fledgling SXSW Interactive conference, and the city’s weird-before-weird-was-a-brand quality all meant editors were curious about you before you even made the follow-up call.

My byline was turning up in places that wouldn’t have returned my calls a year earlier — including Salon, before it found its ideological calling.

Not every chapter from that era held up as well. In 1999 I went to work for a startup whose stated product was information, and whose real concern was its own stock price. I left after five months.

Watching the series again a decade after its 2014 premiere feels like documentation, proof that this era existed, that its people were having the arguments the series depicts about what the technology was for and who it should serve.

That the series never found a wide audience is its own bit of period accuracy. Many of the best things from that era rewarded the curious and eluded everyone else.

The open-web era closed in stages. 

Super Bowl ad inventory became lousy with dotcoms. Napster showed up and we started treating copyright theft as a birthright. 

Y2K descended with apocalyptic fanfare and departed without incident. Craigslist ate the newspaper classifieds. 

SXSW Interactive shed its Omni magazine soul and became an invasion of Bay Area VC clones in black. 

The iPhone made work inescapable. Then the algorithms moved in and decided what we’d think about next.