Going down over a period of more than ten years, Halt and Catch Fire depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the private computer revolution of the 1980s and the early days of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The sequence begins in 1983, just as IBM is cornering the private pc market with the IBM Pc. Halt and Catch Fire skilled low viewership ratings throughout its run, with only the primary episode surpassing a million viewers for its preliminary broadcast. The backstory and elevator sex first initials of Gordon and Donna have been references to Gary and Dorothy Kildall, the married couple who based Digital Research and whose CP/M operating system was displaced after IBM's introduction of DOS. Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark (née Emerson): a pc engineer at Texas Instruments.