Robert X. Cringely traces how a handful of hobbyists building the Altair 8800 in a garage turned into the trillion-dollar personal computer industry. He interviews the people who lived it: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building the Apple II, Bill Gates negotiating the deal that put MS-DOS on every IBM PC, and the engineers behind VisiCalc, the spreadsheet program that convinced businesses computers were worth buying. Cringely walks through Silicon Valley locations and original 1970s and 1980s footage, letting the founders explain their own mistakes as much as their successes, including IBM's decision to let Microsoft keep the rights to DOS, a choice that handed Gates the industry. The film treats the PC's rise less as inevitable progress than as a string of accidents, rivalries, and lucky bets made by very young, very undiplomatic people. Cringely's own dry narration, delivered in character as a tech-industry insider, keeps the tone closer to gossip than reverence, which is why engineers who were actually there still hold it up as accurate.