You wouldn’t know by shuffling past 4Printings in Mountain View today, but 50 years ago this December, Paul Terrell opened the first Byte Shop in the same building.
One of the first personal computer stores in the history of the world, the Byte Shop sold several products, including fully assembled Altair microcomputers. Terrell was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, which also started in 1975. Other members included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
In a now famous story oft repeated by Cult of Mac fanatics, the very next year, 1976, Jobs walked into the Byte Shop and tried to sell Terrell the kit for his new machine, the Apple 1.
In those days, it was common for people to buy kits rather than complete computers, since there really weren’t very many complete computers. The kit would usually include a printed circuit board and the components. The user would solder the whole thing himself and then go find a power supply and a monitor.
Terrell didn’t want to sell any more kits. Instead, he wanted the whole thing assembled. In perhaps the most legendary instance of unintentional seed financing in Silicon Valley history, Terrell placed an order with Jobs for 50 Apple 1 units, if Jobs could just assemble them first and then bring them over to the Byte Shop.
The two Steves then did exactly that. As the legend goes, Terrell’s initial order of 50 assembled units, to be paid COD, helped convince the two Steves to quit working for other companies and get serious about their new adventure. Were it not for that initial order, Apple Computer, as a company, might not have happened.
This is not a new story. It’s been told over and over. But there should be a plaque in front of 1063 El Camino Real in Mountain View. It’s not the Hewlett-Packard Garage, but it deserves recognition.
Especially with the Vintage Computer Festival set to erupt at the Computer History Museum this weekend (see story here), no professional wandering scholar would feel complete without prowling around the very building where this landmark deal went down nearly 50 years ago.
As with many stretches of El Camino, this area has always fascinated me, due to leftover pieces of old Mountain View juxtaposed with newer, more fancy establishments, a beautifully incongruous menagerie of structures. As I walked, I felt tapped into the essence of why people traveled on foot, from ancient times until now. I imagined the landscape of 1975, when Terrell first opened his legendary shop.
In those days, Mountain View was still old-school gritty suburbia, in all the right ways. Numerous dive bars along El Camino. Liquor stores with dark parking lots. Nefarious car washes. Stacks of stoner apartment complexes with beater Datsuns in front. Shoreline Boulevard was called Stierlin Road. There was nothing remotely urban. Orchards and farmland surrounded everything.
On the same stretch where 4Printings today operates, I could see examples of this. Right next door, I saw a barber shop that had been a barber shop for 70 years. Down the block, a decades-old tire shop harmonized a rug store and a newer Giorgio’s Italian Restaurant. Across the street, a similarly decades-old roadside motel was recently-as-of-20-years-ago painted in new shades of yellow, orange and ochre that looked ridiculous. I liked it better when it was a dump.
Similar juxtapositions remained. All I had to do was walk down the alley behind 4Printings and the barber shop. Both places had an entrance in the back. A Porsche and a Tesla were parked behind 4Printings. An old house sat next to the print shop, on the other side. Gorgeous foliage hung over a rusted wrought iron fence. Signage warned me that I was on camera. Nearby, a few side streets away, stacks of generic apartments that went for $700 in the ’80s were now four times as much.
Yet this old-school amble did not come without tremendous feelings of gratitude. The grand sweep of history was unavoidable.
I typed this column on a MacBook Pro. I’ve typed hundreds of these columns on MacBooks Pros.
The chain of karmic momentum that those guys started eventually brought me here. There is no end and no beginning. Jobs would certainly agree.
