Halt and Catch Fire
I’ve recently started re-watching Halt and Catch Fire, that cult TV show set in the 1980s at the dawn of the personal computing era. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a fictionalised but very human take on the battles, obsessions, and occasional breakthroughs that fuelled the PC revolution. It’s not about Apple, IBM, or Compaq directly, it’s about the personalities, the misfits, and the idealists who looked at beige boxes full of chips and wires and saw not just machines, but possibility.
Revisiting it now, decades after the setting and a decade since it first aired, it’s remarkable how much of it feels eerily relevant again. Because in the same way the 1980s were about the rush into personal computing, today we’re experiencing the rush into AI.
And two quotes from the show’s lead engineer really hit me.
“Computers aren’t the thing, they’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”
and
“The future [is] squarely in the hands of those who know computers, not for what they are, but for everything they have the potential to be.”
Now, if you swap the word computers for AI, those lines could be dropped into a keynote today without raising an eyebrow.
The first quote is deceptively simple: Computers aren’t the thing, they’re the thing that gets us to the thing.
At the time the show is set, computers were expensive, mysterious, and often overhyped. Nobody outside of hobbyists really knew what to do with them beyond basic word processing or number crunching. To many people they were gadgets, not tools. The show’s engineer Gordon Clark was trying to articulate that the value of computers wasn’t in the hardware itself, but in the doors it opened to other things: communication, creativity, new industries, new ways of working.
That’s exactly where AI sits today. People get stuck on AI as the thing. A tool you prod, a novelty to play with, or - if you’re in a certain kind of management meeting - something to bolt onto a PowerPoint slide because “we should be doing AI.”
But AI itself isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets us to the thing.
What’s the thing? It depends. For a lawyer, the thing might be rapid contract review. For a designer, it might be new ways to sketch, animate, or prototype. For a child, it might be learning through an interactive story. For a business, it might be automating a process that frees up people to do more valuable work.
AI is only valuable when it becomes invisible, when the conversation stops being about the AI itself and starts being about the outcomes it makes possible.
Then there’s the next quote: The future [is] squarely in the hands of those who know computers, not for what they are, but for everything they have the potential to be.
The potential was what drove the PC revolution. Early computers were slow, awkward, and often disappointing. But the people who shaped the future didn’t see them for what they were, they saw what they could become. They weren’t hung up on the present limitations; they were obsessed with the potential.
Swap “computers” for “AI,” and that’s exactly the position we’re in today.
Right now, a lot of AI still feels clumsy. It hallucinates, it contradicts itself, it stumbles over edge cases. It can frustrate you as often as it delights you. But those limitations are just the surface. The real future lies with the people who can see past them, who can imagine not just what today’s models can do but what they’ll unlock tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean blind optimism. It means balancing the flaws of today against the possibilities of tomorrow. And it means being able to bend the tools into your context, understanding how to implement, not just marvel at them.
There’s something uncanny about watching Halt and Catch Fire while working in and around AI every day. The parallels are everywhere.
In the 1980s, computing was hyped up in glossy magazines but misunderstood by most. Today, AI fills headlines, but the gap between hype and real-world application is just as wide.
In the 1980s, you had engineers tinkering in garages, trying to convince sceptical executives that these machines could change the world. Today, you have AI practitioners prototyping in hackathons, trying to convince boardrooms that the value isn’t in “doing AI” but in what it enables.
In the 1980s, the giants were IBM, Apple, Microsoft. Today, it’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta. But the underlying pattern is the same: early turbulence, wild claims, a few spectacular failures, and somewhere in the middle, a handful of breakthroughs that quietly reshape everything.
The quotes remind me why I spend time not just playing with new AI tools, but figuring out how to implement them meaningfully. For clients at ikirugai, I’m less interested in showing off AI and more interested in embedding it, turning it from an abstract concept into a habit, a muscle, a way of working.
Because the people who win in the AI era won’t be the ones who treat it as a magic trick. They’ll be the ones who understand that AI is the thing that gets us to the thing. They’ll be the ones who don’t just see what it is today, but what it has the potential to be tomorrow.
One of the subplots in Halt and Catch Fire that always resonates with me is how much failure and frustration went hand in hand with progress. The characters hit dead ends, prototypes crashed, investors pulled out. But those who stuck with it, who learned how the pieces fit together, eventually shaped something lasting.
That’s a lesson worth remembering with AI. Plenty of experiments will fail. Plenty of pilots won’t scale. But if you keep at it, if you invest the time to understand how it really works, you move past gimmickry into mastery.
With the right framing, with experience, you can unlock the power that sits behind the clumsiness. You learn when to trust, when to double-check, when to scaffold a prompt, when to loop in another tool, and when to walk away and rethink. You learn how to make AI not just work, but work for you.
The irony of re-watching a show about the birth of the PC revolution while living through the AI revolution is that the script almost writes itself.
Every generation thinks its technology is the big one. But the lesson of Halt and Catch Fire, and the lesson of those quotes is that the technology is never the big one. The big one is what the technology enables.
The people who thrive in this new era will be those who can see beyond the machine, who can look at today’s imperfect models and glimpse the potential. Just as those scrappy engineers of the 1980s looked at clunky beige boxes and saw the seeds of a future that we now take for granted.
“Halt and Catch Fire” was the old command that made a computer spin out of control. The show’s title used it as a metaphor for obsession, the kind that drives people to build something new, even when the odds are against them.
That obsession is back. Today it’s not with PCs, but with AI. And just as in the 1980s, It won’t be the computers - or the AI -that matter in themselves. It’ll be the doors they open.
Computers weren’t the thing. AI isn’t the thing.
They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.
And if you can hold onto that, if you can see the potential and not just the present, you’ll be ready for what comes next.
