Byte Shop

~ the last words ~

In 1975 there was no building you could walk into to buy a computer. There were mail-order advertisements in the back of electronics magazines and there were club meetings, and both assumed you already knew what you wanted. Paul Terrell opened the Byte Shop in Mountain View on 8 December 1975 with Boyd Wilson, and stocked it with what existed at the time, which was the Altair 8800 and a wall of kits and magazines behind the counter.

The following year Steve Jobs came in with a bare circuit board. Terrell had met him at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting and told him to keep in touch, which was a polite way of ending a conversation. What Terrell said in the store was more specific: he did not want a kit, he wanted fifty units, assembled, at five hundred dollars each, cash on delivery. Jobs walked that order to a parts supplier and turned it into thirty days of credit. The Apple I got built on a promise from a shop.

The chain grew on franchising rather than on stores Terrell owned, and it grew fast. Sixty-seven locations by September 1977, seventy-four by November, with outlets in Canada and one in Japan. That was also the year the Apple II and the TRS-80 shipped, both of them finished machines in cases, sold to people who had no interest in soldering. In November 1977 Terrell sold Byte, Inc. to Logical Machine Corporation for four million dollars, and the company he founded was defunct under that name by December.

December 1975 is nine years before I was born, so none of this is mine to remember and I am reading it the same way anyone else does. The part that holds up is not the Apple I. It is that the fifty-unit order was the financing. There was no investor and no bank in it, only a shop owner willing to commit to a number and a supplier willing to read the paper he wrote. That is still the cheapest money available to anybody building hardware, and it is still the money everybody skips past on the way to looking for the other kind.

~ the record ~

~ the fifty boards ~

The Apple I that arrived at the Byte Shop was not a computer in the sense a customer would recognize now. It was a populated board with no case and no power supply, and the buyer had to supply a keyboard and a display before anything happened. Terrell had asked for assembled boards because a store cannot sell a bag of parts to a walk-in, but assembled was as far as Apple could go in 1976.

So the store finished the job. The Byte Shop sold the board for $666.66, and some of them left in koa wood cases built by a local cabinet shop rather than by Apple. That detail says everything about what a computer store was in that year. The manufacturer supplied electronics and the retailer supplied the idea that a person could own one. Around two hundred Apple I units were ever made. Working examples now go for six figures at auction, and the fifty that went through this shop are the reason any of them exist.

~ how it actually ended ~

Logical Machine Corporation was John Peers's company, founded in 1974 in the same part of California. Its own product was the ADAM, a minicomputer running a compiler for an English-like programming language, which was an idea with almost nothing in common with a retail chain selling hobbyist boards. LOMAC bought Byte, Inc. in late 1977 and kept the Byte Shop name running for several years.

It did not go well for either side. Peers left in 1980, the company renamed itself Logical Business Machines and tried to pivot to IBM PC compatibles, and it filed Chapter 11 in 1984. By then the Byte Shop name had lost whatever national meaning it had, because ComputerLand had built the franchise machine properly and Radio Shack was selling computers in every mall in America.

~ the long tail ~

Individual stores outlived the company that owned the sign. Byte Shop Northwest ran independently long enough to be bought by Pacific Bell in 1985, and locations in various towns kept the name for years with no chain behind them. This is what happens to a franchise brand when the center fails: nothing closes on a particular day, the name just stops meaning a company and starts meaning a shop.

Terrell got his four million and moved on to other ventures, which is the ordinary ending. The extraordinary part had already happened by then, in a conversation about whether a board should come assembled. Every retail computer business that came after this one, including the ones that got very large, was operating inside a category that did not exist until a shop in Mountain View opened its doors.

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