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After IBM's corporate raid, IBM's legal counsel interview each compromised Cardiff Electric employee separately. To put pressure on Cardiff Electric, IBM aggressively undercuts Cardiff's business, taking more than two-thirds of Cardiff's revenue and attempts to lure Cameron away by offering her triple her salary; Joe's former boss also unsuccessfully tries to persuade him to drop the project and return to IBM. At night, Joe, Gordon, and Cameron confront each other in the Cardiff parking lot and have a three-way argument with Joe and Gordon getting into a physical altercation. Despite tension among the three, Gordon and Cameron support Joe's vision.
Cardiff Electric is forced to downsize its workforce. Joe tells the remaining engineers that the company will have a portable PC weighing less than 15 pounds by the end of the year; however, the engineers complain that Joe's plan is not feasible. After Joe attempts to secure venture capital from his East Coast contacts, Nathan tells him that Bosworth will handle all of the company's finances going forward; he also arranges a meeting with one of his own business contacts, an heiress named Louise “LouLu” Lutherford. During a dinner party, LouLu offers $10 million in exchange for an 80 percent stake in the PC project. Dissatisfied with the low offer and her attitude, Joe sinks the deal by seducing LouLu's boyfriend. Gordon attempts to come up with innovative ways to meet Joe's design goals; however, one of the engineers keeps killing Gordon's ideas without coming up with any alternatives, and Gordon fires him. Bosworth spots Cameron at the office after hours and tells her that she can work as late as needed, but she cannot live in the office, even though he apparently is temporarily doing exactly that. After cashing her first paycheck, Cameron stays in a hotel; however, she later goes to Joe's apartment after she struggles with the code.
Just as Cameron nears completion of the BIOS code for the new PC, disaster strikes, and she loses all her data. Further complicating the situation, Joe has brought in a reporter from a major business periodical, and he witnesses the chaos with delight. Bosworth is summoned to a meeting by Nathan, who seems to think he might be losing control of the project to Joe. Gordon turns to Donna for help with recovering the lost BIOS code; however, Joe is reluctant to have her there, as she is an engineer for Texas Instruments. She proposes an ingenious technical solution for recovering the data, which eventually proves successful, recovering more than 90 percent of Cameron's work. Later, a suspicious Donna confronts Joe in his office and accuses him of deliberately sabotaging Cameron's work in an effort to generate some publicity for the project. Joe reaches into a desk drawer and produces the real backup disks, proving her correct. While driving home, Joe is pulled over by the police, savagely beaten and arrested for no apparent reason; however, when Bosworth bails him out, Joe realizes that it was a message to remind him that Bosworth was still in charge.
After sending Cameron on a business trip, Joe hires a new software development team. To meet one of the design goals for the new PC, Gordon realizes that a liquid crystal display would be needed. The engineers and Joe argue that an LCD would be too costly; however, Gordon reveals that his father in-law, Gary Emerson, has connections with Kuzoku, a Japanese electronics manufacturer, and can get the displays at a discount. Upon returning from her trip, Cameron clashes with Joe over his recent hire, arguing that adding programmers to the project will delay it. Joe MacMillan, Sr., Joe's father and a high ranking executive at IBM, comes to Dallas to visit his son; however, Joe stands his father up. Joe Sr. later confronts Cameron in his son's apartment, warning her about Joe's volatile past. After Gary reluctantly agrees to broker the meeting with Kuzoku, Gordon promptly blows the deal by making drunken comments about his father in-law. Joe goes to the Kuzoku executives the next day in an attempt to salvage the deal and to apologize on Gordon's behalf; however, Gordon reveals that Gary had already intervened. Cameron installs Colossal Cave Adventure on the company mainframe as a test to find which programmers are the most valuable to the project. Impressed with her ingenuity, Joe makes Cameron the software manager and fires the extra programmers.
The prototype computer is finally finished, and boots up successfully to the cheers and applause of the assembled Cardiff employees. Cameron proposes changes to the operating system's user interface to make it more user-friendly. Both Gordon and Joe reject her idea, with both stating that radical changes to the computer would be too complex and costly to implement and thus more difficult to sell. Hoping to ease the tension between them, Gordon invites Joe over to his house for dinner. After the programmers get frustrated with receiving conflicting orders from both Cameron and Gordon, Bosworth calls Cameron into his office; he cautions her to be careful, as there are those who would like to see her fail, as she "represents the future". When Joe arrives at the Clark household, Gordon isn't home yet, as he had earlier made a promise to Donna that he would find Cabbage Patch Kids for their daughters, a task made more difficult with Hurricane Alicia battering Dallas. Joe must then endure two boisterous children as well as Donna's lobbying on Gordon's behalf for there to be no further changes to the new computer. While playing with the kids, Joe has second thoughts about Cameron's OS; he stops off to see Cameron on his way home
 and asks to see her work.
At Mutiny, the coders discover that users want a way to make cash transactions on Swap Meet; Doug and Craig have been working on a solution to accept credit card transactions prior to Swap Meet's acquisition, and Donna implores Cameron to implement it, but she is reluctant to do so. At Joe's apartment, while studying the ARPANET map, Joe sees potential in NSFNET; however, Ryan sees it as a waste of time, since commercial usage of the network is not permitted. During the Fourth of July weekend, Bosworth and Cameron return to Dallas, with Bosworth seeing his newborn grandson, and Cameron intending to retrieve her father's motorcycle, as her mother and stepfather are moving to Florida; she also meets with her ex-boyfriend Tom to reconcile. When her father's motorcycle is sold to someone else, Bosworth and Cameron have a falling out, and he returns to San Francisco without her. Donna gives Doug and Craig approval to implement their credit card interface; however, when Cameron finally returns, she and Donna argue over that decision. Joe stands by his decision to focus on NSFNET, telling Ryan that they're going to create a regional network from it. When Cameron calls Diane, Cameron finds out about Donna's deception.
At MacMillan Utility, Joe and Ryan begin setting up their regional network. At Mutiny, Cameron reveals that she just fired Doug and Craig; Diane then comes into the conference room, telling Cameron and Donna that Mutiny should consider going public after receiving an acquisition offer from CompuServe. Sensing tension between them, Diane tells Cameron and Donna to think about the decision over the weekend, inviting them to her vacation house in Sonoma to unwind. Joe pitches his NSFNET proposal to the board; despite disapproval from the board, the sector chief of NSFNET accepts Joe's bid. While Donna takes up Diane's offer, Cameron stays at home, where she bonds with Gordon while playing Super Mario Bros. and working with Gordon's amateur radio; Gordon reveals his medical condition to Cameron and airs his grievances against Joe. Cameron goes to Joe’s apartment to convince him to give Gordon his due credit for creating MacMillan Utility. Cameron later unexpectedly moves out of the Clark household, and she reveals to Gordon that she and Tom had gotten married. A senior executive at MacMillan Utility informs Joe that the board had voted to kill the NSFNET project and revoke Joe's executive authority. During a deposition meeting, Joe, against his lawyer's advice, admits that he stole Gordon’s idea.
In light of his confession, Joe is ousted as CEO of MacMillan Utility. Joe tells Ryan that the NSFNET project is on hold, and that he will end up getting fired as well. Gordon's lawyer informs him of Joe's confession and the lawsuit's potential settlement; Gordon later learns about Joe’s NSFNET project after confronting him in his apartment. Donna and Cameron eventually agree to pursue an IPO; the next day, Cameron shows Donna a business plan she drew up to improve Mutiny before the IPO. Donna shows concern over Cameron’s plan, since her plan could take up to two years to fully implement while the IPO's time frame is three months, discussing it with both Diane and Gordon separately. During an office party celebrating Cameron and Tom’s marriage, Cameron calls an impromptu meeting regarding the IPO; the group comes to an impasse as Cameron wants to delay the IPO and improve Mutiny while Donna wants to move forward while they have momentum. Diane, Gordon, and Bosworth reluctantly side with Donna, leaving Cameron in shock. Feeling that he can no longer trust Joe, Ryan reveals that he released the source code for Citadel to the public, claiming that he made it truly free. Shocked, Joe tells Ryan what he did was illegal; however, Ryan shows overconfidence in covering his tracks.
Ryan is being investigated by the FBI for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Donna, Diane, and Bosworth figure out how to go forward on Mutiny’s IPO without Cameron. Because of Ryan's actions, the future of the NSFNET regional network is put into doubt. Joe turns to Cameron for help in tracking Ryan, since he went off the grid, and Joe is concerned for his safety; she eventually finds Ryan at a college library. At Cameron’s house, Tom tells her that his company wants him to move to Tokyo for a promotion, and Cameron is happy to go with him. Ryan later goes to Joe’s apartment; Joe gives Ryan two options: he can either remain a fugitive and lose the network or turn himself in for a chance at redemption. In any case, they would never work together anymore. When Mutiny’s IPO goes live, their stock trades far below expectations, leaving Donna in shock while everyone else at Mutiny is left speechless. In the morning, with the FBI at Joe's door, he discovers Ryan had committed suicide. After that, Joe tells Gordon to complete the work on the regional network without him, as Joe feels he can no longer profit from it.
Donna sets up a meeting in the former Mutiny offices. She, Gordon, Joe, Cameron, and Tom discuss the potential of the World Wide Web, but each have conflicting ideas and concerns; during the discussion, Joe reveals that he met Tim Berners-Lee at a conference in Paris, receiving the hypertext toolkit for the World Wide Web, including the transfer protocol, markup language and server software. He also indicates to Tom that something happened between him and Cameron at COMDEX. The group leaves at a stalemate. Cameron visits Bosworth, having doubts about the project, and he tells her that the project must be worth pursuing if it got everyone together. The next day, Joe writes out the source code for CERN’s web browser, suggesting that they can build something bigger. Everyone except Tom is receptive to Joe’s idea; Tom and Joe get into a heated argument, which escalates into a physical altercation between them. Gordon warns Joe that their past personal grievances against one another may destroy the project before it can even get off the ground. When Donna offers Cameron an opportunity to oust Joe from the project, Cameron tells Donna that she can no longer work with her. Donna replies, begrudgingly, that Cameron can take ownership of the project and leaves. Joe, Gordon, and Cameron gather at a NeXTcubeworkstation and take the first step into the project.