"Halt and Catch Fire" S1E1 - "I/O" Recap

It's the Silicon Prairie in Texas in 1983. Joe McMillan accidentally runs over an armadillo in his hot sports car. He later chats up a young programmer named Cameron Howe, beginning in a class lecture in which he's a guest speaker, shifting into a bar, and then the back room of that bar where they proceed to have sex. His possibly interviewing her for a potential job is his means of foreplay but she's no fool; not at all expecting to get it simply because they've done the deed.

Joe's job in this episode is to trick those at Cardiff Electronics, particularly Bosworth, the Senior VP of Sale into hiring him based off of the zeroes on his last W-2. He also gets engineer Gordon Clark to help him reverse-engineer an IBM PC. Gordon's got a bit of a problem with alcohol and it's putting quite the strain on his relationship with his family, particularly with his wife. Joe wants to fool the Feds into thinking they were simply trying to develop their own PC.

In the end, the duo goes and recruits Cameron to join their little computer team. She's now a college dropout and very much a fish-out-of-water in the posh world of a computer company. The trio are warned by the IBM folks that they'll be destroyed if they make a single mistake in their work and they are warned to not re-engineer any of the computers or technology.

Halt and Catch Fire airs on Sundays on AMC at 10PM.