Floppy Days 141 - Paul Terrell Interview - The Byte Shop Part 2

Episode 141 - Interview with Paul Terrell, The Byte Shop - Part 2 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays Sponsors: 8-Bit Classics  Arcade Shopper   Hello, and welcome to episode 141 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for July, 2024.  I am Randy Kindig, your host, as always, for this historical perspective on obsolete-but-still fun technology. This month I’m bringing you a follow-on interview episode from last month.  As we discussed then, Paul Terrell is a name well-known in the annals of computer history; probably most famously for his kickstart of Apple Computer through the purchase of one of Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s first batches of Apple I computers for his Byte Shop.  The Byte Shop was a very early computer store that was one of the few that existed in the world, at the time. In this interview, we continue to focus primarily on The Byte Shop, how it got started, what it was like, and much more.  There will be even more content in future episodes, as Paul and I had a pretty lengthy discussion on just this topic.  If you want to know what it was like to run a computer store in those early days, this is the interview for you!  Along the way, you’ll learn even more about just what the home and hobby computer scene was like in those days. New Acquisitions/What I’ve Been Up To VCF Southeast - https://gameatl.com/vintage-computing-festival-southeast/  Upcoming Shows Show list I maintain for the remainder of the current year - https://floppydays.libsyn.com/current-year-vintage-computer-show-schedule)  Vintage Computer Festival West - August 2-3 - Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA - https://vcfed.org/events/vintage-computer-festival-west/   Silly Venture SE (Summer Edition) - Aug. 15-18 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2024-se   VCF Midwest - September 7-8 - Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, IL - http://vcfmw.org/  VCF Europe - September 7-8 - Munich, Germany - https://vcfe.org/E/  World of Retrocomputing 2024 Expo - September 14-15 - Kitchener, ON, Canada - https://www.facebook.com/events/s/world-of-retro-computing-2024-/1493036588265072/  Teletext 50 - Sep 21-22 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, UK - https://www.teletext50.com/  Portland Retro Gaming Expo - September 27-29 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, OR - https://retrogamingexpo.com/  Tandy Assembly - September 27-29 - Courtyard by Marriott Springfield - Springfield, OH - http://www.tandyassembly.com/  AmiWest - October 25-27 - Sacramento, CA - https://amiwest.net/  Chicago TI International World Faire - October 26 - Evanston Public Library (Falcon Room, 303), Evanston, IL - http://chicagotiug.sdf.org/faire/   Retro Computer Festival 2024 - November 9-10 - Centre for Computing History, Cambridge, England - https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/72253/Retro-Computer-Festival-2024-Saturday-9th-November/  Silly Venture WE (Winter Edition) - Dec. 5-8 - Gdansk, Poland - https://www.demoparty.net/silly-venture/silly-venture-2024-we   Interview with Paul Terrell (3) Apple-1 Prototype Polaroid Photographs Given to Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop in 1976 - https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/348985606984001-steve-jobs-3-apple-1-prototype-polaroid-photographs-given-to-paul-terrell-of-the-byte-shop-in-1976/?cat=3  Ray Borrill’s Data Domain blog - https://www.landsnail.com/thedatadomain/remember.htm  Transcription of Audio-only Paul Terrell: Now eventually we did get to the point where we needed some legal assistance and we were once again, being in the heart of Silicon Valley, you would network with people.  My salespeople knew a guy by the name of Larry Sonsini, who was a a lawyer in Palo Alto, and he happened to be the lawyer that had taken Intel public and Larry was very interested in what Byte Shop was doing because he was representing legally a lot of the electronics companies that were getting into personal computing. So Larry and I developed a friendship where we got together and I was able to convince him, since we were just a startup to be a little bit lenient with his legal fees and provide us with some legal assistance. And of course, Larry expanded his business right along with us. And he's actually the dominant legal firm in Silicon Valley. He's taken most of the companies public out there. He very much focused in the area of public markets and finance and that kind of thing.  He grew his company and now he has a huge complex of buildings, a campus and in Palo Alto, which in the old days, it used to be called Wilson, Mosier and Sonsini and I think Mosier dropped out of the program, Rosati came in and so forth, but those were good, contacts to have you know in the marketplace because once again relationships. I met Bob Noyce from Intel who was the founder, one of the founders, of Intel and through Larry's relationship and friendship. Another person that was really dominant in the success that we had at Byte Shop was Regis McKenna. And Regis was one of the people that had come out of the semiconductor business. Paul Terrell: He was over at National. Had watched their success and as those semiconductor companies were going public and Larry was taking them public they were they were also a source for a lot of technical people, good management, technical people being able to cash out of the success that they had with the startup company they were involved with to where they created a venture capital market in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Paul Terrell: And prior to that happening, there was very little funding available and actually the initial seed capital that came in for Apple was from Art Rock and Art Rock was a venture capitalist from New York City. So a lot of early startup money that was available to any kind of business was really New York is the center of finance; nobody's bigger than New York and Chicago does well in the mercantile business, but you know in commodities and so forth, but New York is where the big money was and there was really nothing in San Francisco other than some federal entities that the federal reserve was there and so forth, but and there was standard banking, going on. Paul Terrell: Wells Fargo was headquartered there and so forth, but these people weren’t seed capital people these people weren't providing funding for new business and of course there was a ton of new business going on. As a result of all of these semiconductor outfits and so forth. Paul Terrell: So we were seeing a lot of new growth and one of the one good example of a venture capital startup was Don Valentine. And he was the first seed money into Apple along with Art Rock because Art's problem was he was located in in San in New York but he needed to have somebody out here that was looking after his money. Paul Terrell: So a lot of these venture capital people, and actually the big financial institutes from New York would team up with these new technical venture capital people. Coming out of the semiconductor companies and Tom Perkins is a good example. Perkins Kleiner. These were semiconductor guys that got involved with venture capital and Tom was one of the guys that I talked to about when Byte Shop got to the point where we needed additional capital to grow.  When I ended up selling the Byte operation I was opening eight stores a month and spending a lot of time on airplanes and our growth factor was just limited by how much time I had available to get out there and get contracts signed and so forth. Paul Terrell: Then, as I pointed out earlier there were new industries that were being created as a result of the personal computer and and venture capital was one of them that really flourished to the point today where, when you hear about these company startups like Facebook and Google and all of the internet companies that have come out of it. Paul Terrell: A lot of those people were initially funded by all of the people that made their money in personal computing and before we got into Internet and what that was all about. That, and as you pointed out, there’s all these other computer stores across the country were coming into existence. Paul Terrell: The consumer was becoming very aware of computer products. Video games was the big application that really kicked everything off because the electronic companies could make video game machines, which the kids loved. And they can make them very inexpensive versus the cost of putting a computer into a home or an office environment. Paul Terrell: We started to see the marketplace expand with the advent of the. video games and of course that was coming from the coin operated video games and arcades that were out there accessible to the public and so forth. So there were more opportunities to to be 1-on-1 with technology. Paul Terrell: Other than going to Paul Terrell's Byte Shops and and participating in the greatest show on earth. Randy Kindig: A couple questions for you. Did you actually end up with dealerships in other countries besides the U. S. as well? Paul Terrell: Yeah, the first country that we did business with and was Japan, and I actually opened up the Byte Shop SoGo in Japan what, once again, what would happen is people that were traveling to the San Francisco area maybe to a convention or business got exposed to the computer stores and they didn't have them in their countries. Paul Terrell: They would take the time to to look around and see what was going on there. And I had a a gentleman from Japan who would come in, and of course our computers weren't very attractive as products for him to sell other than to people that understood English when he went back to his country, but of course, there were a lot of people in Japan professionals that were multilingual and, once again, we were very fortunate in the computer industry that almost the leaders in the business, IBM and the such they were English speaking and so the languages and all of the materials were when they took computers to their country that were from here, they had to do translations and things. Paul Terrell: So that would have an effect on the amount of growth you could do there, but I was interested in doing a Byte Shop internationally from the legal trademark viewpoint and so we, within the first year, the first when I was involved in selling and expanding the Byte Shop operation I put the Byte Shop SoGo in play and got the trademarks that we needed in Japan. Paul Terrell: Once again, these things were additional expenses for us. So it wasn't something that I was actively pursuing with Byte Shop. But once again, after Byte Shop, I did a number of other businesses in Silicon Valley and once again, expanded a lot of those businesses internationally, but the stage was set, for the early pioneers, in the personal computer market, and then the same thing was happening in their countries where magazines were getting involved in the business. It was more than just retail stores. You could find magazines and of course the Japanese manufacturers, they were the ones that were making all the televisions and radio and electronic products for consumer electronics. Paul Terrell: So they were all interested in this category of either video game or personal computer. They had their own local suppliers that they could deal with. And I think they were just looking at our operations over here in terms of, getting a chance to see how it might evolve in their country and what the opportunities would be. Paul Terrell: one of the things that I was talking about were the individuals, the Tom Perkins the Regis McKenna. And the reason that I keep coming back to Regis McKenna is because Regis being a advertising and public relations person, and his offices were right down the street from from my Byte Shop. His people would spend a lot of time in the Byte Shop in Mountain View and when anybody came to them that they were companies that they were talking to about products and and being the advertising company. Paul Terrell: For that particular product or company, they would bring them into the Byte Shop and show them our operation and what we were doing and what potential market opportunities might be there. And through that association, I ended up hiring Regis to be the advertising and public relations for Byte Shop and, of course, they were. Paul Terrell: The advertising and PR for Intel, and Intel, a lot of these companies that were substantial companies with a lot of funding they would do joint advertising programs. And so we were able through our relationships with Regis to be able to create a whole ad program based on an Intel engineer, son, Ricky coming and visiting the Byte Shop. Paul Terrell: And then we could show off, we could talk about the Intel processor being the what's inside the computer and you see a lot of that co-op advertising is what they call it today and Intel pays a lot of the computer companies that buy their products and put them into the machine. Paul Terrell: They provide a lot of money for these companies. And so if you see Intel inside, that's what that's all about. If the company puts an Intel sticker on their product, they're getting free money, from the supplier, from Intel. And so we were able to leverage a lot of the expense that we would have had with these relationships and probably the most important relationship that Regis ever did for Byte Shop was he introduced me to Jack Wilson, who was the Bureau Chief for Business Week Magazine out of San Francisco and Jack would travel to the Silicon Valley visiting the computer manufacturers like Tandem Corporation, Apple; he would spend a lot of time over there and by the way, Regis I recommended to Regis early on that he get behind Apple once we started carrying the Apple products in the Byte Shop and got Steve Jobs and him together and once again there was a lot of co-op going on between the individuals as we  networked out there. Paul Terrell:  But Jack Wilson was writing an article for Business Week about the technology and the microprocessors and what was going on in Silicon Valley, and they had a technology section of business week, where people that were reading that magazine would go there and see what was going on new in the business. And so when Jack came down to see the Byte Shop he was also looking at the Homebrew Computer Club. He was looking at what was going on with Tandon Corporation, with Commodore, with Apple and so forth. Paul Terrell: And Jack was really amazed at the depth of what was happening with technology and the companies that were getting involved and the extent of the products that these products, these microprocessors, we're going to be in everything in your house. They were going to be in your refrigerators. Paul Terrell: They were going to be in your microwaves. They were going to be in your entertainment products and so forth. So he put together a a story about Silicon Valley and he interviewed me and our interview took about three hours when he came to the store, I took him over to Johnny Luigi and Johnny Frankie and Luigi's pizza parlor, which was two doors down from me, we spent lunchtime there and three hours talking about all of the things that were going on. Paul Terrell: And. And when in July of 76 is when the article came out in BusinessWeek and Jack called me up and said, Paul, he said, I really have to apologize. He said, we spent all that time talking about what you were doing and the computer club and the hobbyists and the computer stores. Paul Terrell: And all, but he said, when I sent the content of my article back to New York, he said, they cut out all of the personal computer stuff because it was just too lengthy. He said, I had 12 pages of an article and the technology section in business week is only about one or two pages, and they just wouldn't allow for it. Paul Terrell: So he said, unfortunately, your stuff isn't going to be in that magazine and I apologize for it. And so anyway, when the magazine came out, I obviously bought a copy of it read about all of these companies. That I was mentioning before being highlighted in there. And and then I got a call from Jack that following week, and he said, hey, he said, good news. Paul Terrell: He said New York has decided to go ahead and run the personal aspect of it. And so I'm going to have your stuff printed. And it'll be in the July 7th edition of business week, you might want to check it out. And when I got that magazine and it hit the street and the news racks, there was in the technology section, you opened it up and there was a picture of me standing behind the cash register in the Byte Shop and underneath the picture, it said Terrell plans franchising in California. That was the title of it. And then it went into all of the things that we were doing with the stores and the obvious, the computer enthusiasts that were out there and, what basically happened is Businessweek had whet the appetites of people with this huge article the previous week about microprocessors and what the future was going to hold, and then all of a sudden, the following week, they come up with a picture of me, and here's how you can make a buck at it. Paul Terrell: “Terrell Plans Franchising”. Let me tell you, all of a sudden, the mailman was coming to the Byte Shop in Mountain View, and he was literally dumping mailbags full of letters on the floor in my store and he said, you're the only Byte Shop in Mountain View. There's no address 1063 West El Camino here.  So I'm assuming that this is all your mail. Paul Terrell:When I opened the letters was people like the chairman of the board of Telex Corporation wanted a three state territory. They were down in Texas. They wanted Texas, Oklahoma. Randy Kindig: Were these people wanting dealerships? Paul Terrell: Yeah, basically they were asking how do they become involved with Byte Shop and what the return on investment was for a Byte Shop store and quite honestly I'd never had any business like that and consequently I went to one of our directors and I mentioned earlier he also had contacts with the Tandy guy Nugent, who was their finance guy down there.  When I went to, his name was Jim Bowles, and Jim was on my board of directors, and so I was telling them that I'm getting all kinds of questions in these letters that I'm not familiar with I didn't really have any college background had not been to business school and had joined the Air Force right out of high school so a lot of the terminology that was being thrown at me was new and ROI was the one return on investment and then, how do we come up with an ROI? Paul Terrell: And what was interesting is that led into another inquiry that we got from a new magazine that had come out and it was called Entrepreneur magazine. And once again, who's an entrepreneur, I don't even know how to spell that one. And as it turned out it was a brand new magazine and for their first issue of the magazine, they wanted to do the Byte Shop dealership in the magazine. So they sent somebody out to me and we sat down and went through the the whole process of what it takes to actually become a Byte Shop dealership complete with inventory investments talking about how to set up a store that was really a very thorough job that they did and we once again, we're being able to benefit from this concept of of networking. Paul Terrell: That was going on in the valley. And as I mentioned before with the sales and marketing and now the business side of things we were getting lots of exposure to a broad market of people out there. Randy Kindig: So I saw some of the stuff that Ray Burrell wrote and he mentioned you. He mentioned your brothers that you had, I think, two brothers that also had dealerships as well. And he was friends with you guys. Paul Terrell: Yeah. Once the program got started in the Bay Area there, one of my brothers had just left college and he came down to see what was going on in the Bay Area. Paul Terrell: And I actually hired a friend of his that had come out of college with him. And they, the two of them came down and One of them went to work for Byte Incorporated and then my brother, once he saw the activity that was going on in the Bay Area and he was from Portland, Oregon, he decided that he wanted to go up to Portland and do a Byte Shop in Portland. And we got him set up as the the Byte Shop of Portland. And I actually had three brothers that got interested one of them was back in North Carolina and he was working for AT& T as an engineer with their computer group Western Electric and he was interested in doing a a Byte Shop back there. Paul Terrell: And then the other brother that was up in Oregon he decided that he wanted to do a Byte Shop in the Seattle area. And once again these were in Repco territories at least the the Washington and Oregon ones were. They became I think Byte Shop number six was the Portland store. Paul Terrell: And then Byte Shop 8 or 10 was was the one in Bellevue, Washington and then actually my brother that was back in North Carolina, his wife was a school teacher, and she was very interested in what was going on with computers and education. And particularly when Apple came out with the Apple II computer there was a lot of software and things that were being developed in that area of education. Paul Terrell: They actively got involved, the two of them, and and did the Byte Shops back on the East coast. And then the brothers in the Northwest were so successful with their multiple stores that they decided that they wanted to get into distribution of computer products, and so they actually set up another company. Microware Distributors became a distribution company for computer products and networking, and about that time networking of these personal computers was really taking off, and there were companies like Cisco that were doing networking cards. Paul Terrell: Novell was a major software and hardware supplier for networking computers. That whole part of the computer industry just exploded.  You weren't just looking for desktop computers to either do entertainment or business type of computer processing, but now the communications part of it was growing and even to the point where you know, that part of the industry had their own networking shows that they were doing annually and we were seeing the show business part of computing really take off with Shelly Adelson came along and started the Comdex shows. Paul Terrell: And when I first met Shelly, he was he was looking to do a show that would deal just to dealers. It was focused on retailers and not so much the education part of computing or other areas. Shelly's Comdex shows became shows that manufacturers who wanted to sell to dealers. Paul Terrell: It was a show where the people coming through the door were going to be dealerships worldwide. And if you wanted to sell to retailers that's what you would you'd go to a Comdex show. If you wanted to sell and have products in the communications area, you went to the networking shows. Paul Terrell: And about that time the the fall joint and the spring joint computer conferences had merged and become what was called the National Computer Conference. And so the NCC became a one, once a year major show. And that's the show that Apple when they came out with the Apple II, and they were going to the broad market and they had gotten funded, they actually went to. The show was being held in Anaheim, California, and for all of the people at the show, when you went by their booth, they were giving you free tickets to Disneyland. Paul Terrell: They had bought out Disneyland for the night, and so to go to their hospitality for Apple you got free admission into the Disneyland Park, and just goes to show, the importance of the personal computing part of the business versus the professional part of the computing. Paul Terrell: When we went to the Anaheim show the booth space that the show people offered to the companies that were involved in personal computing was out in the parking garage of the convention center. And so literally people were going from the convention center and walking around in, they had a couple of levels of the parking garage that was set up with booths. Paul Terrell: And things, but it was becoming obvious to people in the show business that this was going to be something. When Apple is buying Disneyland Park for people to come to their booth we need to get serious about all of these people. And of course the other thing that was happening at these shows, there's, there was hardware as well as software, and the industry was really coming into its own at that time. Paul Terrell: And so my brothers they ended up with retail stores as well as distribution. And after I had sold Byte Shop, they obviously continued on in both of those, and then IBM, when they introduced the IBM PC to the world my brothers became one of the first retailers of the IBM PC. Paul Terrell: And IBM was being very controlled in terms of who they were allowing. They came up with something called a medallion and to be to get an IBM event medallion they would take a review of your operation and see whether you were worthy enough to carry their products. And and once again, they were going to retailers like Sears Sears and Roebuck was a IBM dealer. Paul Terrell: IBM did their own computer stores and the the chain of stores that had actually superseded Byte Shops was ComputerLand. And Bill Millard and Ed Faber; Ed Faber was the president of ComputerLand, and Bill Millard was …, and Ed founded ComputerLand when they were a company in the San Francisco area called IMSAI, I-M-S-A-I, and IMSAI was at the time that I was doing Byte Shops. Paul Terrell: They were a supplier once again of an S100 bus compatible computer, and they were very successful. In manufacturing the S100 IMSAI 8080 is what they called it and they were competing with the Altair people and actually were very good competitors and they had better manufacturing capabilities. There were hundreds, if not thousands of IMSAI computers that I sold through the Byte Shops. And the Apple computers and, all of the other type of computers. Paul Terrell: But, if you have a good thing going, you want to invite your family into the business, they were very successful with their Byte Shops in the northwest. They ended up selling the stores out to a Pac Bell when the phone companies had done their split up. Federal government came in and went after Bell for the monopoly that they had. And so you had the what they called baby Bells regionally around the country that were the new phone companies. And they were looking for businesses, other businesses to get in besides telephones. The other interesting thing at this same timeframe, you have to remember that we couldn't buy phones or computers back in those days, you were renting the hardware products from these companies.  IBM and from Western electric was the manufacturing arm for the AT& T is what it is today. And so we went through a period where all of the baby bells were thinking that they were, are going to be computer stores as well and so they were out buying up the existing computer store chains that were in the marketplace. BusinessLand came along, following in the direction computer land was going and. And trying to be more specific for business but a lot of the early pioneers in the retail business were able to take advantage of these buyout and exit opportunities that came along. Randy Kindig: So you you sent me some pictures, quite a few pictures of the old Byte Shop, and I was wondering, I'm going to try to share my screen here. I was wondering if we could bring those up and maybe just have you comment on those photos, sounds, sound like fun? Paul Terrell: Yeah, I could do that. Randy Kindig: Let me see if I can if I can get it to come up here. Randy Kindig: Do you see this photo? Paul Terrell: Yeah, I do. I see that one. Yeah, that's the Byte Shop in Mountain View. And yeah, that's the… 1 of the pictures is of the Mountain View store. And you can see that's actually a pretty good picture of the front of that store because you're looking at those where the Byte Shop signs are. Paul Terrell: Those are over the windows to the street, you can see a couple of cars parked in front of it. And actually the window on the left hand side there is where we have a big 25 inch color television set that running the Cromemco Dazzler card on a Altair computer so that people just driving along the road would see this. Paul Terrell: We had a kaleidoscope a piece of software that. One of the people that would come in and visit in the store actually wrote the program on our computer there. And I think if you could do a close up, which I don't think you can do for this presentation, but I think you see the sort of the back of somebody sitting there in the window. Paul Terrell: And that was probably the guy writing the Dazzler program that we were displaying there but that's how we would get people's attention to the store and get them to stop and come in and and then the other picture above it is a picture of me in the store I, and actually I've got my hand on a display case there that has the Byte magazines inside the display. Paul Terrell: And when talking to the people at Byte magazine Virginia Peschke was the owner of Byte magazine, and Carl Helmers was her editor, and I contacted Virginia and I was interested in getting the magazine to do something about the Byte Shops. And if you recall, when we came up with the name Byte Shop, we were wanting to have people associate us with the magazine and in terms of who we might be and so what I did was I took a processor technologies display case that they provided to me with the circuit boards that they made. And I put past issues of Byte magazine. I think I had probably six or eight magazines in there. And what I told Virginia is that they should do a page on the jewels of the Byte shop were the Byte magazines. Paul Terrell: And here they are in a display case, and one of the things that we did, which was interesting for the magazine or the publishing industry is, the policy that they had and the way they distribute magazines out to the public were with what were called rack jobbers, and these guys would get bundles of magazines sent to them, and they would go out to newsstands and places To deliver the magazines and everything that wasn't sold, what they would do is when they dropped off the latest issue of the magazine, they would tear the covers off of the old magazines, and then they would credit the retailer with the price of that issue that didn't sell through. There was so much interest in the personal computer industry at the time that I was actually contacting the publishers and buying all of the magazines that they had that were going out of circulation. Paul Terrell: And what I would do, is because there was so much interest and demand in it, is with the Byte magazines you could buy a new issue of Byte magazine for a dollar. And so every month, that one of their magazines got older, I added another dollar to the price. So I was selling magazines for two, two dollars, three dollars, four dollars, and people were collecting these magazines and there were articles in the magazines that were printed that were useful to people that were trying to figure out things to do with the computer because that's what all of the articles that Carl Helmers was writing about in the Byte magazine. Paul Terrell: So there was real value in the old magazines. And when I called the publisher of Popular Electronics Messick, Joe Messick was his name, Joe couldn't believe it. He's a, here he is, he's the guy that's running, I don't know what they called him in the magazine business whether they were actually a president or chief executive or whatever. Paul Terrell: But he was the guy that was tops for popular electronics. And when I called him and told him that I wanted him to send me these back issues, he actually couldn't believe it. And I was willing to pay the same price for a back issue that I was for a current issue. And then once again, I was marking the price up. Paul Terrell: But you can see that in the store. And I, you, I think you have some other pictures there that I was showing you, where the walls, we were trying to put a lot of information in the public's hands. When they came into the store, there's a real education process here. Paul Terrell: Like I said, I was calling it the greatest show on earth coming into one of those stores and obviously having material in there that people could buy for a dollar or two and go home and learn about these things was important. We were trying to show off that particular display area, I don't know how clear you can see, but people would come in to get the paper tape to put in their teletype. Randy Kindig: I see that. Paul Terrell: So there's a supply business going on as well as the magazine business there and that area of the store was the area where you walked right in through the, those front doors you can see in the lower picture. You would come in and that was our main display area and then at the back wall, you had the cash register counter that I was talking about, where, BusinessWeek had taken a picture of me there and then there was a demo room that was in the back. Paul Terrell: Part of the that floor space there where we had all of the, it was a darker room where all of these displays could be more prominent and people would go back there and actually have hands on experience with it and behind the counter that had the cash register; that area in the back was a was our supply room in our office for getting office things taken care of. Randy Kindig: Okay, cool. Let's see here. What else do we got here? That's the same picture. And then these pictures are really grainy. I don't know. These were like scans. I don't know if you can even see that one. Paul Terrell: Yeah, I see it. It's once again, it's that same area. Yeah. And I think in that picture, I had, I was more casually dressed. Paul Terrell: The other thing that was happening I think we did t-shirts and we were saying “take a nibble out of your your Byte” and people didn't know, what is a nibble? What is a byte? One of the issues that I had with Regis McKenna and I used to debate this all the time. Paul Terrell: People, when they heard the word byte, they thought that I was saying bike and they thought I had a bicycle shop. And so I was talking to Regis about it and I said, nobody knows what a byte is and do people even know what a nibble is, a nibble is just, and the bite was a bit. Paul Terrell: And there were bits, bytes and nibbles and so the computer terminology was another thing that people were wrestling with in terms of understanding what was going on here.  And once again, you can see… now that shows you an area of the store where would actually go through those computers so fast that when we got a delivery of 10 or 12 computers, I would just take them in the box that they were shipped in and just stack them up on the floor. Paul Terrell: And then on top of the boxes, we would we would have one of the computers that was inside there. So people these things, we really didn't need a place for inventory because as soon as computers were coming in they were just bouncing off the floor and going out the door. Paul Terrell: And then, as I said before, the other phenomena was weeks later, somebody would come back in. Ray Lynn, who was the Byte Shop of Campbell; he was a programmer over at Basic Timeshare and he was interested. He got his Altair computer and came back and said, look, I want to develop software for this and I'm going to leave Basic Timeshare and go over and start a Byte Shop.  How do I get one of these dealerships? And Todd Anderson was the Byte Shop of Santa Clara. Todd was an engineer at Intel and once again, had bought a computer and and had put it together and came back and said, I want to be Byte Shop number two. And so I told Todd, I said, go five miles down the road. Paul Terrell: I said, that's what Tandy Corporation is doing with Radio Shacks and find an area there and I want to have Byte Shops five miles from everywhere around the United States. So that was the geographic territory that I was allowing no competition within that area. Paul Terrell: And once again, Ray Lynn, he was Byte Shop number three. And I told Ray to go to Campbell. That was five miles down the road from Santa Clara, which is where Todd's store was. So we were starting to set a precedent there. And then Byte Shop number four. Came along and that was an engineer. The interesting story there. Paul Terrell: The guy was actually a vice president of Lockheed Missiles and Space, and he was concerned with his position there at Lockheed that he might be in violation of some kind of an employment situation. So he wanted to remain anonymous in terms of ownership of the store and was asking me if I had some an area, a territory available that was close by. Paul Terrell: And I said there's nothing up in Palo Alto and Stanford university is there, you could be Byte Shops of Palo Alto. And he said how do I get somebody to run it? And I told him, I said, look the manager of the Byte Shop here in Mountain View is looking to get more involved in the business and I've just got I'm working behind the counter here. Paul Terrell: I said, why don't why don't I introduce you to Bob Moody and Bob can become the manager of your store up there. So they put that together and now we had another Byte Shop 5 miles to the north and then we went to San Mateo after that and so forth. But we were trying to find out what is the density in a metropolitan area where these stores would survive each other and these are all questions that, being corporate Byte Shop, that were issues that were on my platter at Byte Incorporated to figure out these things, because nobody had done it before, and can you get a good return on your investment in your store if you've got these guys out there five miles apart? Can they be successful? Of course, we were in a computer saturated area in Silicon Valley, so it wasn't too hard to be successful there. Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. I think it's going to depend a lot on how population dense is the area, like New York and the part of California you were in, maybe Chicago, but other places that are less population dense, you probably would need them further apart, I would think. Randy Kindig: I'm amazed that you can remember all of the different…, you could remember which stores came in what order and all of that. That's pretty incredible. Paul Terrell: Yeah, it was really my life at the time, as I said, towards a month I was spending a lot of time, on airplanes and flying around. Paul Terrell: And of course, when I went down to the Los Angeles area, I think one of the pictures that I sent to you there was the computer fair in San Francisco at Brooks Hall, where Apple was introducing the Apple 2 computer and had a nice island booth there. And I had a 20 foot booth where I was selling the dealerships, the Byte Shop dealerships and showing a map on the wall where people could see, how we were expanding and in California, particularly and LA became the next area that I was focused on in terms of going in and developing stores. And I would actually fly down there on a commuter plane in the morning and catch the shuttle over to the Marriott hotel. And I actually ran my business out of the Marriott there. I would have a set up lunch and appointments with people and breakfast appointments and they'd walk into the hotel and there I am sitting there in the, in a seating area in the lobby and getting, get out my briefcase and my presentation and then I'd be on the 5 o'clock flight back that night, not even staying in the hotel, but just doing business right there. Paul Terrell: And one of my friends that had the, going back to the rep business, he was the Southern California rep that I shared a lot of product lines with me. He laughed at it and said, Paul, he said, these people are thinking that you're down here and staying in this hotel and doing business and you're just moving off to the next deal, but that's the way it was.