It's extremely contrived and deus-ex-machina all the way through.
The "history" the show goes over is crammed into it's Drama first story. The history is there for nostalgia bait, not to celebrate the history or educate. That's why pretty much everything interesting that happened in computing was mangled into coming from the same like 5 people.
And the characters are all just narcissistic assholes who are self destructive because it means the show gets to carry on for another season. It also has the cliche density to feel like a high schooler's homework project.
If you find yourself addicted to reality TV drama, you will enjoy it.
Imagine if you tried to take "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" seriously, and also were watching it because you cared about Philadelphia history. I felt actively patronized the whole time.
I was annoyed by the C64's that were shown as having "C:>" prompts as if they were MS-DOS machines. I think I get where that was coming from -- people who were too young to remember the period were designing the sets and vaguely remembered that "old-timey" computers had "C:>" prompts and given that C64's are old computers, assumed they did too.
Wrong. That's like saying the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels are "contrived." Hello, it's fiction. It isn't there to educate, except insofar as the situations the characters find themselves in teach you something about what it was like back then.
The acting is horrible. The writing is terrible. The story veers off into areas unrelated. There is a moment of a thoroughly unrelated homosexual encounter. (What was the point of that?!) Moments I know that are so really stretched too far to be believable. And on and on.
I lived through that era, too. As historical fiction, HACF is pretty decent. "areas unrelated" -- hello, it's FICTION about a specific era, and, without knowing what specifically you're talking about: maybe those "unrelated" areas are period-setting, or character-developing.
HACF not for you. Let's leave it at that. You can't please everyone.
I'll add Judy Estrin to the list of cool girls from the time, in addition to the non-famous ones I worked with. Her little company stomped our big company at making X terminals back in the 80's. We were probably 70:30 M/F among our ~two dozen new grads.
No, you're wrong. I was there. It was mostly guys, but there were plenty of women as well. Radia Perlman, to name just one famous one. I recall another from Lawrence Livermore whom I met at an IETF. I went to grad school with several of them.
There certainly is a lot of woke revisionist BS around. No doubt about that.
Edit: in my current book "This New Internet Thing" one of the characters, Cassie, wants to adopt a child as a single woman. I got advice on that process by Heidi Buelow (RIP), who was last at Oracle but worked on the Xerox Star, and adopted two children of her own (Cassie is not modeled on Heidi, except for that). Heidi unfortunately died while I was writing it, and I can't find any online obituary on her.
Since we're talking about "back in the day" naturally some of those people have crossed the Great Divide. You can find a few women in here as well:
And since two is more than zero, it's not actually unrealistic to write a fiction about such a character.
A fiction protagonist is often the outlier because they have more interesting interactions than the median type and hence there's more material for the story. This is a pretty basic tenet of drama, not some woke invention.
