Three companies dominate the American tech industry in the early 1990s, and this film sits inside all of them before the World Wide Web changes everything. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appear in interviews alongside the engineers actually building the era's hardware, with footage of Windows NT 3.1 running on beige boxes and Apple's Newton failing to live up to its handwriting-recognition promises. The camera spends real time at General Magic, a company most viewers will never have heard of, following its attempt to build Magic Cap, a whole computing ecosystem organized around software agents meant to anticipate what a user wants before they ask. Former General Magic staff describe the ambition without irony, still convinced decades later that they were right about where computing was headed, just years too early. Giant cell phones and clunky prototype interfaces fill out the period detail. The film's real subject is how close some of these ideas came to the smartphone, and how completely the market ignored them the first time around.