Paul Terrell is an American businessman. In December 1975, he founded Byte Shop, the first personal computer retailer shop. [1] He helped popularize personal computing to the hobbyist and home computing markets, and was the first retailer to sell an Apple Computer, the Apple I.
Paul Terrell started the Byte Shop in Mountain View, California in December 1975. By January, he was approached by individuals who wanted to open their own stores. He signed dealership agreements with them, whereby he would take a percentage of their profits, and soon there were Byte Shops in Hayward, Santa Clara, San Jose, Palo Alto, Fresno, and Portland, Oregon. [1] [2]
In March 1976, Terrell incorporated as Byte, Inc. [1] and was one of the four big computer retailers, along with Dick Heisers, ("The Computer Store"), Peachtree in Atlanta, and Dick Brown.
The Byte Shop was the first retailer of the original Apple I computer. [3] At the time Steve Jobs was planning to sell bare circuit boards for $40, [4] but Terrell told him that he would be interested in the machine only if it came fully assembled, [5] and promised to order 50 of the machines and pay $500 each on delivery.
Jobs contacted Cramer Electronics to order the components he needed to assemble the Apple I Computer. When asked how he was going to pay for the parts, he replied, "I have this purchase order from the Byte Shop chain of computer stores for 50 of my computers and the payment terms are COD. If you give me the parts on a net 30 day terms I can build and deliver the computers in that time frame, collect my money from Terrell at the Byte Shop and pay you." [6] The credit manager called Paul Terrell and verified the validity of the purchase order.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and their small team spent day and night building and testing the computers and delivered to Terrell on time to pay his suppliers and have a profit left over for their celebration and next order. [4]
Terrell grew the enterprise from the first company-owned store in Mountain View, California into a chain of dealerships initially, and eventually into a franchise operation that reached from the United States to Japan.
Byte, Inc. was not only involved in the expansion of its retail chain of stores but began a manufacturing operation to build its own proprietary BYT-8 Computer which was provided only to the Byte Shop stores. This gave both Byte Inc. and its Byte Shops a better profit margin than could be achieved by just distributing the computers of the other computer manufacturers at the time. [7]
In 1977, Terrell sold his chain of 58 Byte Shops to John Peers of Logical Machine Corporation. [8]
Many of the original Byte Shop dealers eventually became independent as the personal computer marketplace grew and became segmented by the various uses and applications the PC was developing. Hobby computer stores were becoming business centers and IBM was entering the market with a computer of its own which over time would become the standard in the industry. Byte Shops of Arizona became MicroAge Computers and developed into a major national distributor as well as having its own chain of stores. Byte Shop Northwest dominated its geographical area and was acquired by Pacific Bell in 1985 when they elected to get into computer stores.
He was portrayed by Brad William Henke in the biopic Jobs .
After selling the Byte Store chain, Terrell convinced his friends Ivy and Kauffman of coin-operated video game company Exidy, Inc to design and build the Exidy Sorcerer to compete with the Apple II, Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 computers already in the marketplace.
The Sorcerer was a modified S-100 bus based machine, but lacked the internal expansion system common to other S-100 systems. It made do with an S-100 expansion card-edge that could connect to an external S-100 expansion cage. The Sorcerer also featured an advanced (for the era) text display that was capable of 64 characters per line, when most systems supported only 40 characters. The Sorcerer did not support sound, color, or in some respects, graphics, which seems at odds with the company's video game background; however, the characters it displayed were programmable by the user.
The Sorcerer made its debut at the Long Beach Computer Show in April 1978 at $895 and generated a 4,000 unit back-log on introduction. The system was never very popular in North America, but found a following in Australia and Europe, notably the Netherlands where the Teleac (broadcaster) used the Exidy Sorcerer for the course Microprocessors. The main importer, Compudata later Tulip Computers, licensed the computer and sold it under their own name until 1983. [9] [10]
Exidy licensed the Sorcerer computer and its software to a Texas-based startup called Dynasty Computer Corporation in 1979. It was relabeled and sold by Dynasty as the Dynasty Smart-Alec.
Paul Terrell started ComputerMania Inc. which was a chain of computer stores created with the purpose of renting computers and software. Computer Retailer Magazine did a feature article on the viability of renting computers and software to the public prior to the passing of legislation in Congress which outlawed the rental of software because of software piracy issues. [11] Hardware rental, however, was unaffected by this decision and continued to flourish into a multibillion-dollar industry. [12]
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. Devices include the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and Apple TV; operating systems include iOS, iPadOS, and macOS; and software applications and services include iTunes, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple TV+.
The Apple Computer 1 (Apple-1), later known predominantly as the Apple I, is an 8-bit motherboard-only personal computer designed by Steve Wozniak and released by the Apple Computer Company in 1976. The company was initially formed to sell the Apple I – its first product – and would later become the world's largest technology company. The idea of starting a company and selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. One of the main innovations of the Apple I was that it included video display terminal circuitry and a keyboard interface on a single board, allowing it to connect to a low-cost composite video monitor instead of an expensive computer terminal, compared to most existing computers at the time. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the first personal computer to include such video output, predated by machines such as the Sol-20 and add-in cards such as the VDM-1.
The Apple III is a business-oriented personal computer produced by Apple Computer and released in 1980. Running the Apple SOS operating system, it was intended as the successor to the Apple II series, but was largely considered a failure in the market. It was designed to provide key features business users wanted in a personal computer: a true typewriter-style upper/lowercase keyboard and an 80-column display.
The Apple II is an early personal computer that was created by Apple Inc. It was one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products, and it played a significant role in the early development of the personal computer industry. It has an 8-bit microprocessor.
NeXT, Inc. was an American technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California that specialized in computer workstations for higher education and business markets, and later developed web software. It was founded in 1985 by CEO Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer co-founder who had been forcibly removed from Apple that year. NeXT debuted with the NeXT Computer in 1988, and released the NeXTcube and smaller NeXTstation in 1990. The series had relatively limited sales, with only about 50,000 total units shipped. Nevertheless, the object-oriented programming and graphical user interface were highly influential trendsetters of computer innovation.
Stephen Gary Wozniak, also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electrical engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his early business partner Steve Jobs. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.
Tandy Corporation was an American family-owned leather-goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Tandy Leather was founded in 1919 as a leather supply store. By the end of the 1950s, under the tutelage of then-CEO Charles Tandy, the company expanded into the hobby market, making leather moccasins and coin purses, making huge sales among Scouts, leading to a fast growth in sales.
The Homebrew Computer Club was an early computer hobbyist group in Menlo Park, California, which met from March 1975 to December 1986. The club had an influential role in the development of the microcomputer revolution and the rise of that aspect of the Silicon Valley information technology industrial complex.
The Sorcerer is a home computer system released in 1978 by the video game company Exidy, later under their Exidy Systems subsidiary. Based on the Zilog Z80 and the general layout of the emerging S-100 standard, the Sorcerer was comparatively advanced when released, especially when compared to the contemporary more commercially successful Commodore PET and TRS-80. The basic design was proposed by Paul Terrell, formerly of the Byte Shop, a pioneering computer store.
Breakout is an arcade video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. and released on May 13, 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak, based on conceptualization from Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow, who were influenced by the seminal 1972 Atari arcade game Pong. In Breakout, a layer of bricks lines the top third of the screen and the goal is to destroy them all by repeatedly bouncing a ball off a paddle into them. The arcade game was released in Japan by Namco. Breakout was a worldwide commercial success, among the top five highest-grossing arcade video games of 1976 in both the United States and Japan and then among the top three highest-grossing arcade video games of 1977 in the US and Japan. The 1978 Atari VCS port uses color graphics instead of a monochrome screen with colored overlay.
Andrew Jay Hertzfeld is an American software engineer who was a member of Apple Computer's original Macintosh development team during the 1980s. After buying an Apple II in January 1978, he went to work for Apple Computer from August 1979 until March 1984, where he was a designer for the Macintosh system software.
Exidy, Inc. was a developer and manufacturer of coin-operated electro-mechanical and video games which operated from 1973 to 1999. They manufactured many notable titles including Death Race (1976), Circus (1978), Star Fire (1978), Venture (1981), Mouse Trap (1981), Crossbow (1983), and Chiller (1986). They were also the creators of the Exidy Sorcerer (1978) home computer platform.
Tulip Computers NV was a Dutch computer manufacturer that manufactured PC clones.
Apple Inc., originally named Apple Computer, Inc., is a multinational corporation that creates and markets consumer electronics and attendant computer software, and is a digital distributor of media content. Apple's core product lines are the iPhone smartphone, iPad tablet computer, and the Macintosh personal computer. The company offers its products online and has a chain of retail stores known as Apple Stores. Founders Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne created Apple Computer Co. on April 1, 1976, to market Wozniak's Apple I desktop computer, and Jobs and Wozniak incorporated the company on January 3, 1977, in Cupertino, California.
Chris Espinosa is a senior employee of Apple Inc., officially employee number 8. Having joined the company at the age of fourteen in 1976 when it was still housed in Steve Jobs's parents' garage, writing software manuals and coding after school, he is the company's current and all-time longest-serving employee.
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5 +1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak at the recommendation of Mike Markkula, and manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 including the controller card and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the Apple II personal computer family to replace the slower cassette tape storage.
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology giant Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
ComputerWare: The MacSource was a chain of ten Macintosh-only retail stores in the greater San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California founded by Karim Khashoggi and Drew Munster. At one time, they were the largest Macintosh-only reseller in the United States. Guy Kawasaki mentions ComputerWare a number of times in his book, The Macintosh Way. Besides the ten stores, ComputerWare also had a headquarters that held international, direct, and corporate sales departments, and at one time had a full hardware repair depot and various training centers on the Bay Area.
The VideoBrain Family Computer is an 8-bit home computer manufactured by Umtech Incorporated, starting in 1977. It is based on the Fairchild Semiconductor F8 CPU. It was not a large commercial success and was discontinued from the market less than three years after its initial release. Some of its lack of success has been attributed to the decision to substitute the APL/S programming language over the then-standard BASIC. Due to the high cost of RAM memory, it only contained 1 KB. It had a full-travel keyboard, unlike some early home computers that featured membrane keypads, but with a very non-standard layout. It was designed by David Chung and Albert Yu.
The Tulip System I is a 16-bit personal computer based on the Intel 8086 and made by Tulip Computers, formerly an import company for the Exidy Sorcerer, called Compudata Systems.
