Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is one of the shows that have developed an ardent following over now but never enjoyed the level of commercial success of other shows. It seems people can’t relate to a bunch of nerds on TV building computers or making web sites discoverable.

Season 4 really hit home for me, because it reminded me of the time I first went online:

But in its final season, “Halt” managed to convey a sincere nostalgia for the optimism of the early Web. Those crappy early HTML pages, with their corny cartoons and lists of links, were doors leading to endless other doors.

Yes. Grey backgrounds, serif fonts, table layouts, blue (as in #0000ff) hyperlinks, the complete lack of white space. This is what the Web looked like when I went online for the first time. Seeing the design and the excitement for the early Web portrayed in Halt and Catch Fire, I developed a nostalgic urge to write some HTML in notepad, slap on some font attributes, and push the whole thing online using FTP.