Oscilloscopes! Hexadecimal code! 1980s Porsches! This is the world of AMC's newest period piece, Halt and Catch Fire, which debuted June 1 (watch the full pilot episode here). The network's next great hope for another Mad Men or Breaking Bad, Halt dives deep into the nerdy early days of the PC, hoping Sunday night TV viewers will go as gaga for Big Blue as they did for Blue Sky.

The show transports us back to a fictional 1983, when personal computing was booming in Texas' Silicon Prairie. We follow a slick visionary, a schmuck engineer, and a wonder-kid coder as they team up to infiltrate and subvert that world.

Joe MacMillian (Lee Pace)—a leather-jacket-wearing, Porsche-driving former IBM salesman—gets a new job selling software at Cardiff Electric company. He picks coworker Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a hapless computer genius stuck in a cubicle, to help him reverse-engineer an IBM PC. He wants to steal his old employer's code and build a chip of his own. Gordon reluctantly agrees to help, and gives a pretty great speech explaining computer guts.

"It's called open architecture," he says, rolling his eyes. "A personal computer is a nothing box full of electronics, switches and hardware. The IBM, the Altair, the Apple 2 … it's all the same junk."

But IBM does own one thing inside the machine: The firmware interface ROM BIOS, hidden on one of the computer chips. In four days, Gordon, with Joe eating pizza and drinking Dr. Pepper over his shoulder, reverse-engineers the boot code. With this information, they can kind-of-maybe clone the software and build their own chip and become billionaires from someone else's work.

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Their plan unravels pretty quickly, so they hire our anti-heroine, Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), to take over the coding job. She uses the ol' quarter-on-a-string trick to play arcade games for free, so we know she's going to be pretty spunky this season. More hints can be found in the show's name: The show tells us "halt and catch fire" is "an early computer command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once. Control of the computer could not be regained."

Can programmers inspire the same dramatic tension as advertising execs? The verdict after Sunday's pilot is… maybe. HBO's Silicon Valley operates in this same universe, but Mike Judge's show acknowledges that its content is dull. The self-awareness is what's fun about that show. Meanwhile, Halt and Catch Fire is insistent that the computer-programming world is the fun part. You can drink Dr. Pepper! And hang out in dark garages! Did we mention the Dr. Pepper!

Still, as Joe says: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." Halt might be using computer programmers in much the same way. And even if Halt and Catch Fire can feel like a Mad Men rip-off, we're still eager to see what thing this show takes us to. And frankly we'll follow a man who drives a Porsche 944 anywhere.

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