Halt and Catch Fire is a fascinating AMC series about the 1980s computer industry, and its intense characters and nostalgic evocations of classic startups have made it a cult favorite over the past two years. Each season explores one aspect of the nascent tech scene—first in Austin, then San Francisco—by re-imagining key moments in the early days of personal computing. Season 1 brought us the drama of creating the first PC clones, season 2 was a tale of early online gaming and chatroom community at startup Mutiny, and season 3 started this week with a look at online services like eBay as well as antivirus software (evil marketing genius Joe has morphed into John McAfee). It's off to a great start, providing a nuanced look at online privacy and startup culture.

You might say that Halt and Catch Fire is an alternate history of the techie 1980s, re-imagining the origins of today's online world through the lives of our struggling, flawed geek heroes. Maybe "alternate history" sounds like a strong term for a show that offers a fairly realistic snapshot of the '80s tech world, right down to the bleepy music and New Wave design of the credits. Many details, like the marketing of PC clones and online communities like CompuServe, are fairly accurate. But often, events that happened in the 1990s and 2000s are injected into the story. This season, for example, Mutiny founders Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Donna (Kerry Bishé) are basically inventing eBay. But they do it by navigating a very 2000s-era tech issue: digital privacy.

Cameron and Donna come up with their eBay idea by spying on their users' private chats to figure out what people do when they chat one on one. The two gradually realize that people are either hooking up (aka meeting offline), or trading old game controllers and comics. This leads Donna and Cameron to their eureka moment: why not create a "swap" functionality for users on Mutiny's forums? It's basically the birth of eBay, roughly ten years early. The writing here is particularly savvy, as we are never allowed to forget that this discovery is only possible because Mutiny has no respect for its users' privacy. Even though one of their engineers is pushing Cameron and Donna to create private, encrypted chat, the two are not concerned.

But not everyone is so dismissive of computer security concerns. The season premiere ends at the Castro Theater, where Joe (Lee Pace) is pimping his security company's new consumer antivirus software. Obviously modeled on McAfee, which was founded in 1987, Joe's company is using a scaremongering marketing campaign based on the slogan "Are you safe?" Charismatic basket case Joe is the perfect fictionalized version of John McAfee, who is known for his hallucinatory philosophical diatribes. In this alternate history, however, Joe's antivirus software is a blatant ripoff of something created by his former business partner Gordon (Scoot McNairy). Emotionally troubled and brought low last season by illness, Gordon is bouncing back in season 3 with a lawsuit against Joe. He's still working at his wife Donna's company but is looking to strike out on his own.

Gordon and Donna's relationship is one of the most painfully realistic parts of the series, but it also feels like something from the "lean in" feminism world of 2016. Both are gifted engineers who developed a PC clone together in season 1, but they've seen very different levels of success—largely due to tech world sexism but also random chance. Gordon got rich while Donna struggled. To get a better job, Donna took a risk and jumped to an executive role at Cameron's startup, Mutiny. The gains will be tremendous if Mutiny can break out, but every day presents a financial or technical hurdle until that happens. Gordon and Donna's marriage is strained by a simmering competitiveness between two people who are working in the same field and trying to make it big in the early days of personal computing.

As the young cyberpunk visionary who founded Mutiny, Cameron continues to be the show's center of gravity. Initially, her company was an elaborate online game that garnered a cult following. But then Donna helped her expand it into chat rooms and private chat, which boosted their users to more than 100,000. This season, they've moved the operation to San Francisco and are looking to do something that can compete with CompuServe. Which is why they are thinking about going in an eBay-ish direction. We're watching Cameron struggle to balance her underground hacker sensibilities with Silicon Valley startup culture, and it's not always easy. In this way, she evokes classic '80s tech movies like Real Genius, which dramatize what happens when nerd geniuses try (and fail) to work within the system.

Halt and Catch Fire is also fascinating to watch side-by-side with this decade's other big cult tech series, Mr. Robot. They are both character-driven shows about techies, and they both deal with the cultural impact of computers at key points in history. While Mr. Robot pushes us five minutes into the future, Halt and Catch Fire takes us back to the origins of all the tech that shapes our lives today. By seeding 1980s history with today's concerns, show creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher Rogers force us to consider how the origins of a new technology can shape its whole lifetime. That's particularly interesting in light of this season's focus on privacy and infosec, two issues that are notoriously neglected and misrepresented in the media (and the tech industry itself). When you build an empire on violating user privacy and selling antivirus snake oil... maybe you create a world that's heading for a Mr. Robot scenario. That's the kind of subversive suggestion that sneaks into almost every episode of Halt and Catch Fire.

Watch for the cultural nuance or watch for the tech nostalgia. But whatever you do, if computers have changed your life, you'll want to watch Halt and Catch Fire. The first two seasons are streaming on Netflix. The third season is unfolding in real time on AMC.