Halt and Catch Fire is a fascinating AMC series about the 1980s computer industry, and its intense characters and nostalgic evocations of classic startups have made it a cult favorite over the past two years. Each season explores one aspect of the nascent tech scene—first in Austin, then San Francisco—by re-imagining key moments in the early days of personal computing. Season 1 brought us the drama of creating the first PC clones, season 2 was a tale of early online gaming and chatroom community at startup Mutiny, and season 3 started this week with a look at online services like eBay as well as antivirus software (evil marketing genius Joe has morphed into John McAfee). It’s off to a great start, providing a nuanced look at online privacy and startup culture.

You might say that Halt and Catch Fire is an alternate history of the techie 1980s, re-imagining the origins of today’s online world through the lives of our struggling, flawed geek heroes. Maybe “alternate history” sounds like a strong term for a show that offers a fairly realistic snapshot of the ’80s tech world, right down to the bleepy music and New Wave design of the credits. Many details, like the marketing of PC clones and online communities like CompuServe, are fairly accurate. But often, events that happened in the 1990s and 2000s are injected into the story. This season, for example, Mutiny founders Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Donna (Kerry Bishé) are basically inventing eBay. But they do it by navigating a very 2000s-era tech issue: digital privacy.

Cameron and Donna come up with their eBay idea by spying on their users’ private chats to figure out what people do when they chat one on one. The two gradually realize that people are either hooking up (aka meeting offline), or trading old game controllers and comics. This leads Donna and Cameron to their eureka moment: why not create a “swap” functionality for users on Mutiny’s forums? It’s basically the birth of eBay, roughly ten years early. The writing here is particularly savvy, as we are never allowed to forget that this discovery is only possible because Mutiny has no respect for its users’ privacy. Even though one of their engineers is pushing Cameron and Donna to create private, encrypted chat, the two are not concerned.