In November 1984, Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, editors of the Whole Earth Catalog, bring together the people Steven Levy had just profiled in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution for a weekend conference in Sausalito, California. The film is built from interviews shot over that gathering with twelve early figures of the movement, spanning the original MIT programmers of the 1950s and 60s through the Silicon Valley inventors who turned their obsession into the personal computer industry. The word "hacker" here means something specific and mostly lost since: not an intruder breaking into systems, but a programmer chasing elegant code for its own sake, driven by what the film calls the hacker ethic, open access to information and machines, distrust of authority, judgment based on skill rather than credentials. Shot on video with the plain visual style of the period, the film lets its subjects talk at length about what they built and why, offering a direct record of the culture that produced the PC before it became an industry.