April 11, 1976: Wood Box, Meet Circuit Board. Now You Have an Apple I
The founders of Apple Computer had an idea: they would cater to the hobbyist market and sell circuit boards. Hobbyists would take the circuit boards, do a little soldering, add a case, power supply and a bunch of chips and end up with their own computers.
The plan changed when Steve Jobs managed to sell fifty Apple Is to the first computer retailer of the day: the Byte Shop. The rub was that the forerunner of CompUSA, realizing what customers actually wanted, desired complete computers rather than do-it-yourself circuit boards.
What the Byte Shop got wasn't truly a complete computer but it was far more than a bare circuit board. The set featured 1 kB of video RAM, a clock speed of 1 MHz and was capable of displaying 40 x 24 characters on whatever monitor you cared to hack together. The computer was the Apple 1 and it was this month in 1976 that you could actually buy one. But only from the Byte Shop.
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One year my family took a trip to the west coast using Chex cereals boxtops to get 2 for 1 ticket on Republic Airlines. On the way up the coast we stopped at Stanford so that I could visit Art Schawlow to discuss a postdoc in his lab. The Nobel prize slowed down his research. (Not so, for Charlie Townes, who is still at it.) During a tour the lab, he pulled an Apple I out from under a table opposite his desk. It was one of the most primitive looking devices I ever saw during years of doing research. Art said that he kept after Wozniak to improve the display, but he was certainly delighted by the Apple in the era of the DEC PDP machines.