Halt and Catch Fire - Sales Call [ "A16" Scene ]
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters post it as a favorite scene about IBM's reputation and sales psychology.
What it is
A scene from the TV drama Halt and Catch Fire in which Gordon Clark meets Joe MacMillan, who is posing as an IBM salesman, on a sales call. It includes the dialogue about IBM being the safe choice and a marketing guru telling an engineer when to stop talking.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec danielvaughn · 2026-02 · on “Halt and Catch Fire: TV's Best Drama You've Probably Never Heard Of (2021)”
Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen. edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: [this video]
Recommends j1vms · 2018-10 · on “IBM’s Old Playbook”
Think you'll get a kick out of this scene from Halt and Catch Fire: [this video] [0] [0] Sales call scene with Joe and Gordon in Halt and Catch Fire: Season 1 Episode 1 [1] [LINK]
Recommends danielvaughn · 2023-11 · on “When to Shut Up: A Visual Guide (With Included Algorithm)”
This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Halt and Catch Fire, when the marketing guru tells the sales engineer (in no uncertain terms) when to shut up: [this video]
Cites jyunwai · 2024-01 · on “Google lays off Bay Area workers, closes Mtn View child care center”
The term did come back a bit in 2014 with the great television series "Halt and Catch Fire." The metonymy of "Big Blue" was regularly used in the series (especially in the pilot) to describe IBM as a huge entity that a forcefully-made new division of a smaller company was competing against, to develop a personal computer in the 1980s. This scene in the pilot about a salesman trying to convince another company's executives to choose his products over IBM's describes the feeling behind the term very well: [this video]
Cites udev4096 · 2024-07 · on “The New Internet”
> You know what, nobody ever got fired for buying AWS. > That’s an IBM analogy. Wow, this dialogue comes in the first episode of halt and catch fire. I didn't know this was a real thing Here's the clip at 1.51 minutes, if anyone's interested: [this video]