Technology History | 1063 West El Camino Real — The Order That Forced Apple to Assemble

Paul Terrell wanted fifty of them, assembled, and he would pay $500 each in cash on delivery.

Steve Jobs had walked into this shop hoping to sell bare circuit boards for around forty dollars apiece.

Terrell had opened the Byte Shop here at 1063 West El Camino Real on 8 December 1975, among the first retail stores anywhere devoted to computers.

He knew Jobs and Wozniak from the Homebrew Computer Club, and he had a shopkeeper's problem: kits sat unsold because customers could not build them.

His condition changed what Apple was. A company selling boards to hobbyists now had to buy components, assemble hardware, test it and deliver against a deadline.

The order came to $25,000 and Apple had no money for parts. Jobs got them from Cramer Electronics on thirty-day terms only after a credit manager telephoned Terrell and confirmed the purchase order was real.

Assembly happened at Jobs's parents' house in Los Altos, in a bedroom until the bedroom filled up, then the garage.

The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at $666.66, a price Wozniak chose because he liked repeating digits and it landed about a third above cost.

Calling it assembled flattered it. The buyer still had to supply a case, a power supply, a keyboard and a display, and only around two hundred were ever built.

Terrell sold the Byte Shop chain in 1977, and the store that placed the order closed long before Apple became a household name.

Nothing at the address says any of this happened. The storefront is a print shop now, on a stretch of El Camino Real that Terrell picked in 1975 for one reason: passing traffic could see into the window.

Anyone standing outside is looking at a thousand square feet of ordinary retail frontage, which is the honest scale of the moment.

The photograph shows an Apple I main logic board, displayed at De Anza College — a board of this kind is what fifty deliveries to this address looked like.

Photo: Alison Cassidy, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.