Origins of Business
Paul Terrell started his Byte Shop in December 1975. By January he was being approached by people 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 Santa Clara, San Jose, Palo Alto, and Portland, Oregon.
In March 1976, Terrell incorporated as Byte, Inc.
By March 1976, one could identify four big retailers; Terrell, Heisers, Peachtree in Atlanta, and Dick Brown. Brown opened his outlet "The Computer Store" like Heiser's in 1975 along Route 128 in Burlington, Massachusetts.
He also was interested in selling Apple I's. Without Paul Terrell and the Byte Shop, Apple may have never gotten anywhere.
Terrell grew the enterprise from the first company owned store in Mt. View, California into a chain of dealerships initially, and eventually into a franchise operation that reached from the United States to Japan before the parent company Byte, Inc. was sold to Logical Machine Corporation. 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 BYTE 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.
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 became 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 became a target acquisition for Pacific Bell (RBOC predecessor to the modern AT&T) when they elected to get into computer stores.
Byte Shop of South Florida continued in operation as Byte Shop Computers. Eventually re-expanding then moving its business to Naples, Florida in 1986. In 2003 Byte Shop Computers was Acquired by Jim Wexell.
After the sale of Byte, Inc. to John Peers of Logical Machine Corporation, Paul Terrell went on to create the personal computer of his dreams and provide a hungry marketplace for personal computers the most advanced computer of the time.
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