Mmmm, no, the whole "soul" thing and the personalized approach is essentially the mythos of the Mac, and to a lesser extent the the Apple II before it. But they're essentially designing the Mac (while making the Grid Compass), not an iPod. More apps, faster, etc. has absolutely nothing to do with what created the "Apple II Forever" cult that existed well into the 1990s. Nothing with a "soul" was reflected in the marketplace at the time but it was not a foreign idea or resigned to movie monsters. Even the concept of a "soul" and what makes a machine different or special is rather plastic and has been assigned to all sorts of machines whether or not they made any attempt to say your name, ahem, Amiga.
Read any books by or about Marvin Minsky from the period. Read any hyperbolic tech journalistic fantasy about where things were going, particularly in the household and all that they're trying to achieve are in there. It's where people have wanted to go from the beginning and the computer book section was filled with both fiction and non-fiction works on getting there. Even in the early '80s, because I was reading some of them. I wouldn't be surprised if the authors of the show read The Soul of a New Machine, from 1981. I didn't read it until 1984 but so much of the struggles designing this thing, pulled in all directions by economics, physics, time, fear and big dreams is in there, as well as Steven Levy's book.
I even recall a commercial that goes back to what must be 1980, because I'm associating it with the evening that the Rankin Bass animated The Return of the King played on TV (though it could have even been earlier than this and a televised broadcast of The Hobbit from 1977, either of these puts it 1980 at the latest). I don't recall what company it was for. In hindsight I want to say Xerox because it wasn't about a particular product it was a commercial about "the future" and in it a fellow comes to work and is greeted by his computer, who addresses him by name on the screen.
The computer, though my memory is fuzzy, had a layout similar to the Lisa and I believe it was in a horizontal case with the monitor placed to the left of the case. Compaq would have a portable sorta like this later and I've seen it in other computers as well (I think of this commercial every time I see this layout). Anyway, during the course of this guy settling in to work for the day there is some kind of reveal that the day is special, like it's the fellow's birthday, and the computer congratulates the fellow with a picture of a rose. I'm pretty sure it was a rose. The image kind of paints on as a series of horizontal lines.
This commercial and its vision of a personalized "relationship" with its user has stuck with me all these years. I was nine years old and the only other thought, even, of a computer was limited to what they represented in Star Wars, something for R2D2 to plug into, and maybe one episode of either The Rockford Files or CHiPS or something. But that idea of the personalized experience was seared into my head at that moment and over the years I've thought about it each and every time I've seen a film by The Ladd Company, because their logo of the tree paints itself onto the screen in horizontal lines the same way that 1980 corporate fantasy of the future way we'll be dealing with computers did.
So, sorry, but I don't agree with your assessment of the period. It's a fact, none of this has ever been a part of any IBM PC Clone, but this is a fictional narrative about big ideas during a time there were a lot of big ideas even if we didn't know how to build it yet. The show isn't about a specific company or machine and it's easy enough to see Cardiff and its characters are pulling liberally from all sorts of companies and personalities.
It's about the era where "anything was possible" and personal computing was such a blank slate but so much of it was ironically shackled by its dependence on being PC compatible and anything that wasn't this was an "also ran". But these were the ideas that inspired new generations of people to be interested in computers. Not what they were as a collection of facts or even what software they could run. That's not inspiring. Not at all. That that's what dictated the success and failure in the cold, bland marketplace is only a fact. The truth is inspiration came from someplace else and is more about what characters like Cameron and Joe are obsessing over even though engineers like Gordon are already dead or just locked in some Asperger's love affair with the machine itself for what it is and not what it does or might someday do.
It's what inspired a little kid to actually think about what a computer was and what it might be, enough to learn some BASIC a year or two before his family ever even owned a computer.
