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By Root 493 0

Club, was busy sorting out people with a commercial bent from the engineers. That wasn’t difficult since members were allowed to advertise their interests during the meetings. Paul Terrell was one of the more prominent salesmen and had become an influential figure in the murky world of distributors and kit suppliers. He had been selling peripherals for minicomputers until he had seen a demonstration of the Altair—after which he had quickly arranged to represent MITS in Northern California. At Homebrew meetings Terrell had pushed the Altair machines and ran afoul of the delicate sensitivities of the Homebrew members when he tried to charge $500 for a version of BASIC on paper tape.

Like others, Terrell had underestimated the enthusiasm of the hobbyists and when word of the Altair spread, he found engineers waiting outside his office door at the start of business while his regular customers started to complain that they couldn’t negotiate his jammed switchboard. So Terrell buckled. “I decided we should go up on El Camino, open a store, hang out a shingle, and get all the guys who were sitting in traffic jams at four P.M.” In December 1975 he transferred $12,700 worth of MITS inventory from his sales company to a computer store in Mountain View which he called the Byte Shop.

But Terrell’s ambitions stretched far beyond the parish. He examined and planned to emulate Radio Shack’s enormous chain of distributors and hoped someday to stock his stores with computers that he would manufacture. In private he chatted about a nationwide chain of Byte Shops like an enthusiastic goose breeder. He talked of “force-feeding the pipeline” and “pumping the product out” but he had to start somewhere and El Camino was a longer, if not better, strip than most. So El Camino, where almost every idea in search of a market was sure to find a temporary home, housed yet another. By the early summer of 1976 there were three Byte stores scattered along El Camino among the hot-tub emporiums, hi-fi stores, automobile dealers, and fast-food outlets. For the hobbyists, and for anybody hoping to sell a microcomputer, the imprimatur of the Byte Shop had become a seal worth having.

Terrell was one of the few Homebrew members with the means to buy more than one computer, so Jobs, hoping to obtain deposits before placing a firm order for one hundred printed circuit boards, visited the Byte Shop. Terrell had been wary of Jobs at Homebrew meetings. “You can always tell the guys who are going to give you a hard time. I was always cautious of him.” Nevertheless, when Jobs slopped into the store, Terrell made time for him. Jobs showed Terrell a prototype of the Apple and explained his plans. Terrell told Jobs that he had no interest in selling plain, printed circuit boards and said that his customers didn’t have any interest in scouring supply stores for semiconductors and other parts. Terrell said he was interested in buying only fully assembled and fully tested computers. Jobs asked how much Terrell would be prepared to pay for a fully assembled computer and was told anywhere between $489 and $589. The Emperor of the Byte Shops told Jobs that he would be prepared to place an order for fifty fully assembled Apple computers and would pay cash on delivery.

Jobs could not believe either his ears or his eyes—“I just saw dollar signs”—and rushed to telephone Wozniak at Hewlett-Packard. Wozniak, equally dumbfounded, told his colleagues around the lab who greeted the news with disbelief. Wozniak placed Terrell’s order in perspective—“That was the biggest single episode in all of the company’s history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected.” Terrell’s order entirely changed the scale and scope of the enterprise. The size of the business had expanded tenfold and instead of contemplating costs of around $2,500 for one hundred printed circuit boards, Jobs and Wozniak were looking at a bill of around $25,000 to cover the costs of one hundred fully assembled machines. Fifty would go to Terrell and the Byte Shop while Jobs and Wozniak would try to sell