Few spaces are as hallowed in tech-startup lore as the humble garage. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their company in one in Palo Alto in 1939. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (and, yes, Ronald Wayne) launched Apple in Jobs’ Los Altos, California, garage in 1976. And let us not forget another duo, Joe MacMillan and Gordon Clark, who reverse-engineered an IBM PC in the garage of Clark’s Dallas home during a single weekend in 1983, setting their company Cardiff Electric on course to develop a portable PC twice as fast and half as expensive as anything then available.

OK, so maybe that last one is made up.

It’s the plot of Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s latest prestige drama, set in Texas’ Silicon Prairie during the personal computer boom of the early ’80s. And we won’t even know until the end of the 10-episode season (premiering this Sunday) whether MacMillan (Lee Pace, of the late ABC cult favorite Pushing Daisies), Clark (Argo and 12 Years a Slave’s Scoot McNairy), and their colleagues are able to bring their cutting-edge tech to market, or if their dreams get crushed by industry heavyweight Big Blue. But the point is, the plot—and the stakes—should feel as real as possible to the viewer. “Authenticity is huge for us,” says showrunner Jonathan Lisco. “We’re constantly making sure the verisimilitude of the show is as impervious as possible.”

The thought is that getting the tech (and techies) just right will not only make for better storytelling, but also endear the show to the geek demographic. Says actress Mackenzie Davis, who plays the show’s punk-rock coder Cameron Howe: “We need the groundswell of nerds to be like, ‘You have to watch this!’”

Everybody involved with the series—from the network execs on down—agrees that for Halt itself to succeed, the series has to be as true to the time and place as possible. “AMC really wanted us to make sure that all of this felt accurate,” says executive producer Melissa Bernstein. “The best shows and the best stories come from specificity.” Bernstein should know: She was co-executive producer on AMC’s Breaking Bad, an experience she calls “great preparation” for another show with such granular attention to detail.

It can’t hurt Halt’s chances that its June 1 premiere steps into the hallowed timeslot that saw Mad Men’s midseason finale the week before. Of course, it’s inevitable that the two AMC series will be compared in terms of period authenticity: Mad Men is, after all, the standard bearer of the Golden Age of Fastidiously Detailed Televison. And they’ll no doubt be compared in other respects, as well: Halt is also a workplace drama that revolves around a dark, mysterious anti-hero—in this case, new Cardiff hire MacMillan, a former IBM man with a shadowy past. To make Cardiff “exist plausibly within the cracks of history,” Halt co-creator Chris Cantwell says, its characters interact with (or work for) real-life companies like IBM and Texas Instruments. In that sense, it’s a lot like the way Mad Men has woven its fictional copywriters and account execs into the history of 1960s advertising.

Halt’s hawkeyed production designer Chris Brown knows this sort of terrain—he’s a six-season Mad Men vet. However, he stresses, this isn’t Sterling Cooper & Redux. “The technology is the challenge here, mostly because it’s a very specific world, one outside the purview of pretty much everybody who’s typically employed in a film or a television art department,” Brown says. “By its nature, advertising is abstract and in the mind of the character. So it can be whatever Don Draper says it needs to be—whereas here, we’re dealing with a piece of hardware”—the Cardiff PC—“that has to obey the laws of physics and computer science.”

Photo courtesy of AMC Networks

It’s a perfect, sunny March afternoon in Atlanta, and Scoot McNairy is hanging out with the crew in the parking lot of the onetime dog-food factory that currently serves as the Halt and Catch Fire sound stage. McNairy has just finished shooting a tense standoff with his onscreen wife Donna, played by Kerry Bishé, in the Clarks’ darkened garage. (This isn’t the first time the two have worked together; they also play husband and wife in Argo.)

McNairy has rid himself of some of Gordon’s nerdwear, like his wire-frame glasses, though he’s still got on the dad jeans and the period-correct digital watch. Costume designer Kimberly Adams allows that the character has “a bit of Wozniak’s flavor,” but says she sought sartorial inspiration from less iconic computer pioneers, like original MS-DOS author Tim Paterson.

McNairy has since put on his own Smith’s Auto & Truck Service camouflage cap. A fishing-lure tattoo peeks out the left sleeve of his white V-neck. The principal cast’s only actual Texan, McNairy has no tech expertise—he’d rather be fishing. Or woodworking. “For Gordon, the garage is like my carpentry shop, where I go to meditate,” McNairy says. “Something great happens there in the beginning—but from there on out, what happens in the garage is a downward spiral.”

At the onset of the series, Gordon Clark is a bitter sad-sack, having abandoned his dreams several years ago after the disastrous COMDEX unveiling of the Symphonic, an advanced computer he and Donna designed together. (One of the shows’ many Easter eggs: Gordon and Donna Clarks’ first initials and back story echo those of Gary and Dorothy Kildall, whose CP/M operating system was crushed by IBM’s introduction of PC DOS.) The “something great” that happens in the garage is when Clark and MacMillan reverse-engineer the IBM PC in the pilot. It’s what the show’s other creator, Chris Rogers, calls Halt and Catch Fire’s "version of Walt and Jesse cooking meth."

The reverse-engineering montage was the most technically intensive, worked-over scene in the whole season and took a full day to shoot. Technical adviser Carl Ledbetter, an IBM senior lab director during the ’80s, was on set that day—and not just in the wings. He was under the desk, controlling the lights on the bread board, a visual representation of the hexadecimal code Pace and McNairy’s characters are reading from the IBM PC ROM BIOS chip. Ledbetter also hand-fed preprinted pages of the final BIOS assembly code through the scene’s dot-matrix printer at a pace to match the device’s correct speed (as gleaned from YouTube videos).

>He wasn't just in the wings—he was under the desk, controlling the lights on the bread board.

The montage’s real “grace note,” Cantwell says, is when Clark electrically grounds himself using his wedding ring, a subtle bit that is 100 percent technically accurate but wasn’t in the script. “I asked Carl, ‘Can you be grounded to the ring?’” McNairy recalls. “Yeah, yeah, the actors bring ideas, too! Because I thought that would symbolize something: ‘Donna, trust me on this.’ And it’s Gordon essentially trying to ground himself to the relationship, and not let the two of them separate.”

That Cantwell and Rogers are in this position at all is something of a surprise. Both screenwriting program grads, the two met while working in online marketing at Disney and wrote a TV pilot together that got them a new agent. The rep urged the pair to write another pilot to help them land staff jobs on a TV show. In January 2011, the duo came up with an idea for a TV show that had highly personal roots: It would be based on Cantwell’s father’s career as a systems software salesman in early ’80s Silicon Prairie. The Halt script was never intended as anything more than a staffing script, but attracted one very interested party. By the end of the year the Chrises—both in their early 30s—had landed a deal with AMC to create the series. “The first writers’ room we walked into was our own,” Cantwell says.

In the course of their research, Cantwell and Rogers came across the early computer command HCF (Halt and Catch Fire), which, as the pilot’s opening text explains, “sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once.” It was the perfect metaphor, they felt, for the sharp-elbowed PC business of the early ’80s.

Ledbetter calls the title “neat,” but hastens to clarify that a true HCF command dates back not in the Intel era, but to the late ’70s, the heyday of the Motorola 6800 microprocessor. “It was an instruction that was actually used for debugging,” he says, and then goes on to share more than you’ll ever need to know about the Motorola 6800 instruction set. This is why you hire someone like Carl Ledbetter to be your technical adviser.

Halt’s prop and set-dressing departments found much of the show’s vintage ’80s tech on eBay or through private collectors. But the problem with setting a tech series 30 years in the past—as opposed to, say, HBO’s modern-day comedy Silicon Valley, which also goes to great lengths to achieve technical accuracy—is that most of the machinery you want to get your hands on is in terrible shape, lining a landfill, or behind glass in a museum.

One item the Halt team couldn’t track down was a period CAD/CAM system that fit their needs. So using reference photos from the era, the construction department built an elegant replica—a dual-screened creation named the Dara, after production assistant Dara Watson. Other major pieces of tech made just for the show include the Clarks’ homebrew Symphonic, put together by the art department, and the Cardiff PC, fabricated by an outside vendor.

The art department also created a fictional regional cola called Ranger. (Using a real brand would have presented rights and ad-sales issues.) “The art department makes things that fit seamlessly into this world,” Cantwell says. “I’m hoping people will say, ‘I remember that!’ and actually it’s just something we made up.”

And then there are the occasional smaller liberties that need to be taken. For instance, the Cardiff offices’ Zenith Z-120 PCs. On the show, the Z-120s are presented as terminal computers supposedly wired to a mainframe; in real life the Z-100 series were standalone computers, not networked machines. “But when you need 19 of them, you’re excited to find what you can find that dates appropriately,” Brown says. He compares Halt’s PC situation to what he drolly refers to as “the great tragedy of set decoration” in season one of Mad Men. That season takes place in 1960, but (gasp!) the typewriters in the Sterling Cooper office are IBM Selectrics, which—much to the delight of anachronism-spotters—weren’t introduced until 1961. Again, the decision to go with the wrong model was a result of the lack of availability—and the fact that the 1960 manual-return models they could get generally didn’t work.

That choice was made with the blessing of notoriously persnickety Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner. “Chris and Chris are not as specific as Matthew,” Brown says, “although few people are as specific as Matthew. On some levels, it’s great to have a specific request come to you, because then there’s a plan. But on the other hand, there’s the joy of exploration and discovery.” Creative temperaments aside, there’s one key reason the Chrises can’t be as hands-on as Weiner: Unlike Mad Men, where both the writers’ room and the production are based in Los Angeles, Halt’s writing staff works in LA, a four-hour flight from Atlanta and its generous tax breaks for TV productions—which makes “just running over to the props department” a bit of an endeavor.

However, there's always at least one writer on set; the day I visited, it was Zack Whedon (Joss’s younger brother), who co-wrote the episode being filmed. During a quick break in shooting the day’s first scene, Pace takes Whedon aside to ask how his character would react to a mention of the real-world hacking exploits of the 414 gang, whose young spokesperson, Neal Patrick, made the cover of Newsweek’s September 5, 1983 edition. (The word hacker was unfamiliar enough back then that it appears in quotes.). After all, says showrunner Lisco, “it’s about the attitudes, not just the technology.”

In fact, it’s a constant challenge not to have Halt’s characters appear overly informed or too prescient, especially given that an iPhone in every pocket is something the writers and actors all take for granted. “There were times when we’d look at a script and say, ‘Hmm, there’s something here that feels like it was written in 2014. What is it?’” Lisco recalls. “And then—like piranhas—we would go in there and find out: ‘Well, this is why’—because embedded in this layperson's line is the knowledge that you can move data through the phone network.”

Photo courtesy of AMC Networks

At the same time, the writers and crew have to make sure they don’t view the world through Tom Cruise’s Ray-Bans. Sure, there’s some I Love the 80s fodder: The Speak & Spell makes an appearance in the pilot, and Rubik’s Cubes are scattered on Cardiff coders’ desks. But don’t expect to hear hits like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” blasting out of boom boxes—not only is that expensive, says music supervisor Thomas Golubić (Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead), but it’s “kitschy.”

Besides, in many ways, the characters’ microcosm hasn’t caught up to 1983 quite yet—this is Dallas not New York or Los Angeles. As the series begins, Cardiff is a systems software company mired in the old way of doing business—thus the office’s neutral colors and late-’70s design. “It’s not Miami Vice yet,” Brown says. While Crockett and Tubbs didn’t make their network TV debut until 1984, their universe’s neon and Nagel-print aesthetic “doesn’t happen for another five years in our story time,” the production designer says.

Whatever basic cable audiences may make of the show’s attention to accuracy, Cantwell is proud to report that the Cardiff Electric set has at least passed muster with the man who inspired it all. “I brought my dad and mom out when we shot episode two, and the sets were not finished yet,” he says. “But even with the protective construction sheeting over the computers and the desks, it really took my dad back. That was a cool thing to see. Because when I was 18 years old and he was a computer salesman, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna do that, Dad. I’m gonna go out to Hollywood and be a screenwriter. I’m going to go as far away from what you did as possible.’ And here I am making a show that’s essentially set in the world of my dad’s career. As far away as I wanted go, I’m now as close to it as possible.”