At a user meetup for Mutiny, an online gaming company founded by Cameron and Donna, one young woman tearfully thanks Cameron for creating a service where she met people who helped her to escape her horrible home life. “I didn’t have anyone to talk about it until I found Mutiny,” she says, wrapping Cameron in a hug. “There are a bunch of people dealing with the same sort of stuff and they helped me realize that I could walk away. That there wasn’t anything wrong with me.” Unfortunately, not all connections forged on the internet are so positive; when one of Mutiny’s programmers, a queer man named Lev, finally goes on a date with a man he’s been flirting with on the company’s chat service, he ends up brutally beaten by homophobes who had been posing as his “friend” the entire time.

It’s a moment that foreshadows the dark future ahead for the anonymous and unaccountable corners of the internet, the places that aren’t escapes from harassment and abuse but rather places where harassment and abuse often cannot be escaped. Its fundamental lesson is all the more grim two decades later: Every tool can be a weapon if you allow dangerous people to wield it like one.

Its fundamental lesson is all the more grim two decades later: Every tool can be a weapon if you allow dangerous people to wield it like one.

One young programmer, who ultimately kills himself, offers a prescient warning in his suicide note: “Beware of false prophets who will sell you a fake future, of bad teachers and corrupt leaders and dirty corporations … But most of all beware of each other, because everything is about to change. The world is going to crack wide open. The barriers between us will disappear, and we’re not ready. We’ll hurt each other in new ways. We’ll sell and be sold. We’ll expose our most tender selves only to be mocked and destroyed. We’ll be so vulnerable and we’ll pay the price.”

Although the show’s starry-eyed innovators, and particularly its female game developers, never encounter the hate mobs and harassment that await them in the future, they all end up paying a personal price in one way or another for their work, especially as the industry they created begins to leave them behind. When the 1990s arrive in the final season—and they arrive in their 30s and 40s—the future of computing has finally come to pass, though not entirely in the way they had imagined.

Cameron, whose clever adventure games were once so beloved by early computer adopters, finds herself increasingly obsolete in an industry where violent splatterfests like Doom and Mortal Kombat dominate. Speaking at a panel titled “The Future of Internet Gaming,” she futilely insists that first-person shooters are cheap, manipulative flashes in the pan, little more than blood-drenched slot machines. “They’ll keep you coming back, but they’re not going to fulfill you in any way,” she says. “You have to respect the player.”

Unfortunately for her, appetites have changed; her newest work, a pensive, solitary exploration game called Pilgrim, is brutally panned by a gaming magazine as “ponderous,” and shelved as commercially unviable. “It feels like homework,” says one teen playtester, when every path he takes in the game seems to loop him back to where he started. “What the hell, we’re back at the beginning! This is bullshit.”

All of it worked for a while, all of it was a beautiful idea until it ended, and the next thing began. It’s easy to call these failures, but they’re more like iterations in the lifelong experiment of trial and error that people hope can lead them closer to what they really want, and closer to themselves.

It’s a feeling all of the characters on Halt and Catch Fire experience more than once as their brilliant ideas soar, crash, and burn time after time, leaving them back at square one. The show’s premiere defines the term “halt and catch fire” as “an early machine command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all conditions to compete for superiority at once,” but the Wikipedia definition of the term is equally relevant: code that causes the CPU to “cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart.”

The cycle of passion, loss of control, and hard reboot runs through not just every business endeavor but nearly every relationship on the show. When the on-again, off-again love affair between Cameron and Joe finally falls apart, she tells him, “I wanted us to work. And we did, for a while.” It’s a sad moment, but not one that negates the value of the time they spent together. Their work at companies like Cardiff Electronics, Mutiny, Comet, and even Gordon and Donna’s marriage—all of it worked for a while, all of it was a beautiful idea until it ended, and the next thing began. It’s easy to call these failures, but they’re more like iterations in the lifelong experiment of trial and error that people hope can lead them closer to what they really want, and closer to themselves.