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FloppyDays Vintage Computing Podcast

Randall Kindig

Floppy Days Vintage Computing Podcast

  • 1 hour 38 minutes
    Floppy Days 144 - Interview with Don French and Steve Leininger, Co-Designers of the TRS-80 Model I

    Episode 144 - Interview with Don French and Steve Leininger, Co-Designers of the TRS-80 Model I

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    Hello, and welcome to episode 144 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for October, 2024.  I am Randy Kindig, your host for this audio ode to the home computers of the past.

    This month I have a special treat for you.  At the recent Tandy Assembly, which I will talk about in more detail later in the podcast, not only were there a lot of great people, exhibits, vendors, and camaraderie, but we were also blessed with having Steve Leininger as one of the guest speakers along with his partner in the development of the TRS-80 Model I, Don French!

    I recently had an interview with Steve Leininger (episode 142: https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-142-interview-with-steve-leininger-designer-of-the-trs-80-model-i ), thanks to his willingness to be interviewed at the recent VCF Southeast in Atlanta.  That was a milestone for my podcast, as I had always wanted to talk with Steve.  I also had interviewed Don French several years ago, prior to his attending Tandy Assembly in 2017, in episode 53 (https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-53-interview-with-don-french-co-designer-of-the-trs-80-model-i ).  This time, however, I was able to get an interview with Don and Steve together in the same interview!  That in itself was amazing and I think you’ll really enjoy the back-and-forth between the two gentlemen who are obviously and correctly proud of the work they did to bring the TRS-80 to the world and Tandy into the computer business.

    Next month, I will talk about another computer rescue that came my way recently, and which is also tied into Tandy Assembly and Radio Shack computers.  I’ll not go into any further detail here as I don’t want to spoil the story for you next month.  But believe me, it will be fun both to tell and to listen to.

    New Acquisitions/What I’ve Been Up To

    Upcoming Shows

     

    27 October 2024, 10:13 pm
  • 1 hour 16 minutes
    Floppy Days 143 - Paul Terrell Interview - The Byte Shop Part 3

    Episode 143 - Interview with Paul Terrell, The Byte Shop - Part 3

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    Hello, and welcome to episode 143 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for September, 2024.  I am Randy Kindig, your host for this retro ride to the past of home computing.

    This month I’m continuing the series of interviews I’ve been doing recently with Paul Terrell.  As we have discussed, 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.  This is part 3 of a 4-part series on just that topic with Paul.  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.

    In future episodes, Paul and I will discuss other topics around his long and distinguished career, such as the aforementioned dealings with the fledgling Apple Computer, and other ventures in which Paul was involved after the Byte Shop, including a business that rented software.

    New Acquisitions/What I’ve Been Up To

    Upcoming Shows

    Interview with Paul Terrell

     

    25 September 2024, 8:21 pm
  • 1 hour 22 minutes
    Floppy Days 142 - Interview with Steve Leininger, Designer of the TRS-80 Model I

    Interview with Steve Leininger, Designer of the TRS-80- Model I

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    0                                 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 13 sec              Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 42 sec              Intro 9 min 03 sec             bumper - Peter Bartlett  9 min 11 sec              New Acquisitions 17 min 11 sec             bumper - Ian Mavric  17 min 19 sec            Upcoming Computer Shows 21 min 53 sec            bumper - Myles Wakeham 21 min 58 sec            Meet the Listeners 28 min 37 sec            Interview with Steve Leininger 1 hr 20 min 29 sec    Closing

    This particular episode has a special meaning for me, personally.  You see, as I’ve mentioned on earlier episodes, the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy/Radio Shack was my first home computer (even though my first programmable device was a TI58C calculator).  I recall the joy and wonder of playing with the machine (it wasn’t called the Model I at that time; just the TRS-80; as it was the first of the line) in the local Radio Shack store in 1977 and 1978 and the incredible rush of owning one in 1979; after my wife purchased a Level I BASIC machine for me as a gift for college graduation.  That machine only had 4K of RAM and 4K of ROM (Tiny BASIC), as it was the entry-level machine, but it was a thing of beauty.  I felt like I could do anything with that machine, even though my justification to the wife was that we could track our checkbook and recipes on it.  I think she knew better, but went along with it anyway.  The computer came with everything you needed, including a tape drive and black-and-white monitor, which was good for a poor recent college graduate.  I quickly, as finances allowed with my new engineering job, upgraded the computer to 16K of RAM and Level II BASIC (a powerful Microsoft 12K ROM BASIC) and enjoyed the machine immensely, even using it in my job supporting the build-out of a new nuclear power plant back in those days.

    I eventually sold off the Model I, in favor of a computer that had color graphics and sound (the Atari 800), but have always continued to have a huge soft spot for that first computer.

    When I started the Floppy Days Podcast, one of the people that has always been on my bucket list to interview has been Steve Leininger, who, along with Don French while at Radio Shack designed the TRS-80 Model I, among other things.  A few years back, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Steve for the Trash Talk Podcast, when I was co-hosting that show, but an ill-timed trip to the hospital for my son meant that I was not able to participate.  While my son’s health is of paramount importance, of course, I always wanted to get another chance to talk with Steve.  Not only was Steve the designer of one of my favorite home computers of all time, but he also was a fellow Purdue University Boilermaker, who graduated just a year before I started there.  The thought that I could have met Steve on campus if I’d been there just a year earlier was very intriguing to me, and fueled my desire to talk with Steve even more.

    In the last episode (#141 with Paul Terrell) I talked about VCF Southeast in Atlanta in July of 2024.  After I had made plans to attend that show, I was flabbergasted to find out that Earl Baugh, one of the show organizers, had somehow managed to contact Steve and get him to come to the show!  I have to thank Earl for the work he did to make that happen.  Here was my opportunity to certainly meet Steve, and perhaps even talk with him!  I prepped some questions, just in case I was able to get an interview.

    While at the show, I met Steve and asked him if he would be willing to do a short interview for Floppy Days while at the show.  Amazingly, he was very kind and agreed to do that.  We found a quiet room and I was able to talk with Steve for almost an hour.  This show contains that interview.

    Another note on this: as you’ll hear in the interview, the connection to Steve is even stronger than I realized!  He not only went to my alma mater, but also grew up in some of the same towns that myself and my wife did.  We personally peripherally know some of his relatives.  Things like this really do make you think the world is small!

    One other, final, note: This interview even ties into the recent and continuing interviews I’ve been publishing with Paul Terrell.  As you’ll hear in upcoming episodes with Paul, and in this interview with Steve, Steve actually worked at the Byte Shop before getting the first job with Tandy, and in fact his work at the Byte Shop directly led to him getting hired by Tandy to design the Model I.

    Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed getting it.  I am overjoyed I finally got the chance to talk to one of my vintage computer heroes, Steve Leininger!

    New Acquisitions

    Upcoming Shows

    Interview

     

    Transcript of Interview-Only

    Randy Kindig: All right. I really appreciate your time today, Steve. 

    Steve Leininger: Thank you for having me, Randy. 

    Randy Kindig: So let's start out maybe just by talking about where You live today, and what you do?

    Steve Leininger: I live in Woodland Park, Colorado, which is 8, 500 feet, right out in front of we got Pike's Peak out our front window.

    Randy Kindig: Oh. Oh, that's nice. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah we get snow up through about June, and then it starts again about September. But it's not as much snow as you would imagine. 

    Randy Kindig: I've got property in Montana, and I lived out there for a couple of years, 

    Steve Leininger: so there you go. 

    Randy Kindig: We probably got more snow up there. 

    Steve Leininger: Hey, you asked what I did.  I'm involved with Boy Scouts, a maker space with a church based ministry firewood ministry, actually. Some people call it a fire bank. So we provide firewood to people who can't afford that. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh. 

    Steve Leininger: So it's like a food bank, but with fire, firewood. 

    Randy Kindig: I've never heard of that.

    Steve Leininger: We source the firewood. We cut it down and we split it. Lots of volunteers involved; pretty big project. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay, cool. I also wanted to mention, I'm a fellow Boilermaker. 

    Steve Leininger: There you go. 

    Randy Kindig: I know you went to Purdue, right? 

    Steve Leininger: I did go to Purdue. 

    Randy Kindig: Did you ever get back there? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, and in fact they've got a couple learning spaces named after us.

    Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. 

    Steve Leininger: We've been donating to our respective alma maters. My wife went to IU. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, is that right? Oh my. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, oh my and me. Yeah, the fact that the family who's all IU, their family tolerated me was, quite a remarkable thing. 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. 

    I find it interesting because I think you graduated in 76, is that right?

    Steve Leininger: 74. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, 74. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. I was there from …

    Randy Kindig: Oh yeah, you actually were gone before I started. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I was there from 70 to 73. 70 to 70 four. When I graduated in four years, I got both my bachelor's and master's degree by going through the summer. I managed to pass out of the first year classes because of some of the high school stuff yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. I started in 75, so I guess we just missed each other. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. Yeah. You're the new kids coming in. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. . So I, I found that interesting and I wanted to say that. Do you keep up with their sports program or anything like that?

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, they play a pretty good game of basketball in fact, I ribbed my wife about it because she was from the earlier days, the Bobby Knight days at IU that were phenomenal. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. For those of you listening, I'm talking with Steve Leininger, who was the primary developer, if not the developer, of the TRS 80 Model I..

    Steve Leininger: I did all the hardware and software for it. I'll give Don French credit for sticking to it and getting a project started. And for refining, refining our product definition a little bit to where it was better than it would have been if I would have stopped early. 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. And I have talked with Don before.

    I've interviewed him on the podcast, and I met him at Tandy Assembly. But I'm just curious, when you were hired into Tandy and you were told what you were going to do; exactly what were you told? 

    Steve Leininger: They had a 16 bit microprocessor board that another consultant had developed.

    And they were trying to make a personal computer out of this. It was the Pace microprocessor, which was not a spectacular success for National, but it was one of the first 16 bit processors. But they had basically an initial prototype, might have been even the second level of the thing.

    No real documentation, no software, ran on three different voltages and didn't have input or output. Other than that, it was fine. I was brought in because I was one of the product one of the engineers for the development boards, the development board series for the SCAMP, the S C M P, the National Semiconductor had a very low cost microprocessor that at one point in time, I benchmarked against the 8080 with positive benchmarks and ours was faster on the benchmarks I put together, but as I was later told there's lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.

    But so they said take a look at using that, their low cost microprocessor that you were working with. And it really wasn't the right answer for the job. Let's see, the Altair was already out. Okay. That was the first real personal computer. The Apple, the Apple 1 was out.

    Okay. But it was not a consumer computer. Okay. They, it was just, it was like a cookie sheet of parts, which was very similar to what was used in the Atari games at the commercial games. Okay. pong and that kind of stuff at that time. And I had been working, after Purdue, I went to National Semiconductor.

    There's a long story behind all that. But in the process, some of us engineers would go up to the Homebrew Computer Club that met monthly up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. We're talking Wilbur and Orville Wright kinds of things going on. Yeah. Everyone who was in the pioneering version of computing had at one time been to that meeting.

    Randy Kindig: It's very famous. Yeah. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. And Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were basically a couple guys working out of their garage at the time. I was still working at National Semiconductor, but I also had a Moonlight job at Byte Shop number 2. The second computer store in all of California.

    Randy Kindig: And So you worked with Paul Terrell.

    Steve Leininger: I actually worked with one of, yeah, Paul, I actually worked for Paul's I don't know if it was a partner, Todd, I don't even remember the guy's name. But I just, it was. 

    Randy Kindig: I was curious because I'm talking to Paul right now and getting interviews.

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. I, I'm sure we met, but it wasn't anything horribly formal. Since it was the number two shop, it still wasn't the number one shop, which Paul worked out of. And so we had an Apple 1 there. I actually got the job because I when I When I went in there, they were trying to troubleshoot something with what looked like an oscilloscope that they pulled out of a tank, and so it had, audio level kind of bandwidth, but could not do a digital circuit. And I said what you really need is a, I told him, a good tectonic scope or something like that. He said do you want a job here? I ended up moonlighting there, which was, as fortune would have it, was a good deal when the folks from Radio Shack came down to visit.

    Because when they came down to visit the sales guy wasn't there. We'll let the engineer talk to them, they almost never let the engineers talk to them. 

    Randy Kindig: So you had to talk with them. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. It was John Roach, Don French, and it was probably Jack Sellers, okay and Don was probably the; he was the most on top of stuff electronically because he was a hobbyist of sorts. The other two guys: Mr. Sellers ran the engineering group. John Roach was the VP of manufacturing. And they were basically on a parts visit. They do it once a year, once, twice a year.

    And they also did it with Motorola and a couple other places. But I told him about this microprocessor and that I was writing a tiny BASIC for it. Okay. Tiny BASIC was a interpreted basic that a guy named Li-Chen Wang actually had the first thing in Dr. Dobbs, Dr. Dobbs magazine. We're talking about, we're talking about things that you don't realize are the shoulders of giants that turned out to be the shoulders of giants. And in fact, we reached out to Mr. Wang as we were working on it. We thought we had the software already taken care of because I'm jumping ahead in the story, but we were going to have Bob Uterich, and you'd have to chase that back.

    We had him signed up to write a BASIC interpreter for us, but because he'd already done one for the 6800, and it was included in Interface Age magazine. on a plastic record. You remember the old plastic records you could put in a magazine? 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, I did see that. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, so this was called a floppy ROM when they did it.

    Yeah. So if you had the right software and everything you could download the software off of the floppy ROM and run it on 6800. I think he used the Southwest Technical Products thing. And so we'd signed him up to do the BASIC. This was independent of the hardware design I was doing. And he went into radio silence on us; couldn't find him.

    And so we get to, in parallel, I was using the Li-Chen Wang plan to do at least a demo version of BASIC that would run on the original computer. And when the demo went successfully on Groundhog Day in 1977. This is the time frame we're talking about.

    I I started work on July 5th, the year before it. With Tandy? Yeah. Okay. We rolled into town on the 3rd, and of course they're closed for the 4th. And on the 5th I started, and there was the wandering around in the desert at the beginning of that, and Don's probably talked about how I was moved from there to their audio factory and then to the old saddle factory.

    Tandy used to be primarily a leather company before they bought Radio Shack in 1966 or something like that. And anyway, when the software didn't come out, I ended up writing the software, too. So I designed all the hardware and all the software. I didn't do the power supply.

    Chris Klein did the power supply. And, a little bit of the analog video circuitry, but it was very little part of that. Because we were just making a video signal. I did all the digital stuff on that. Yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: So the software ended up being what was the level one ROM, right? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, the level one ROM started out as the Li-Chen Wang BASIC.

    But he had no I. O. in his software, so I was doing the keyboard scanning. I had to do the cassette record and playback. Had to implement data read and data write Peek and poke, which is pretty simple. Put in the graphic statements. Yeah, oh, and floating point. Now, floating point, luckily, Zilog had a library for that, but I had to basically, this was before APIs were a big deal, so I basically had to use their interface, To what I had written and had to allocate storage, correct?

    We're talking about 4K bytes of ROM. I know, yeah. Very tiny, and to put all the I. O. in there, and to make it so that you could be updating the screen, when you're doing the cassette I put two asterisks up there and blinked the second one on and off, you remember that? 

    Randy Kindig: Oh yeah.

    Steve Leininger: Sort of as a level set. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. 

    Steve Leininger: And someone said, oh, you should have patented that thing. And actually I have seven or eight patents, U. S. patents, on different parts of the computer architecture. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, do you? 

    Steve Leininger: But not the blinking asterisk, which is probably a patentable feature. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, I wish I'd had that on other machines, that I ended up having.

    So that would have been nice, yeah. I liken what you've done with what Steve Wozniak did, for the Apple II. You're somebody I've always wanted to talk to because I felt like you were one of the important pioneers in their early years. What do you have to say about that?

    Do you feel like what you did was ...

    Steve Leininger: in retrospect, yes. And I have a greater appreciation for people like the Wright Brothers. If you think about the Wright Brothers they took all their stuff from their Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop down to Kill Devil Hills. We now know it as Kitty Hawk.

    But they would take the stuff down there by train, and then they would have to put it in horse driven wagons. Think about that. And people would ask them, what are you going to use the airplane for? It's what are you going to use a home computer for?

    Yeah, to maintain recipes and to play games. 

    Randy Kindig: Do your checkbook. 

    Steve Leininger: Do your check, home security. There's a whole lot of stuff that we talked about. And other giants entered the field: Multiplan, which became Lotus 1 2 3, which became Excel. Not the same company, but the idea, could you live without a spreadsheet today? Very difficult for some things, right? 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. Yeah, it's ubiquitous. 

    People use it for everything. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been, I talked with David and Teresa Walsh. Or Welsh, I'm sorry, Welsh. Where they did the book Priming the Pump.

    Steve Leininger: That's very that's pretty close to the real thing. 

    Randy Kindig: Is it? Okay. They named their book after what you did and said; that you primed the pump for home computers. Can you expand on that and tell us exactly what you meant by that? 

    Steve Leininger: It again goes back to that shoulders of giants thing, and I forget who said that; it's actually a very old quote, I can see further because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I think the thing that we brought to the table and Independently, Commodore and Apple did the same thing in 1977. There were three computers that came out inexpensive enough that you could use them in the home.

    They all came with ROM loaded BASIC. You didn't have to load anything else in. They all came with a video output. Some had displays. Some Commodore's was built in. One of ours was a Clip on and you had to go find one for the apple. For the Apple, yeah. Apple had a superior case. Apple and Radio Shack both had great keyboards.

    Randy Kindig: apple was expandable, with its...

    Steve Leininger: yeah, Apple Apple was internally expandable, yeah. And, but it cost $1,000. Without the cassette. Without the monitor. It wasn't the same type of device. 

    Randy Kindig: I was a college student. And, I looked at all three options. It was like the TRS-80; there are Radio Shacks everywhere.  You could go in and play with one; which was nice. And they were inexpensive enough that I could actually afford one.

    Steve Leininger: And, Radio Shack can't duck the, if you did something wrong, you had to fix it. 

    Randy Kindig: That's right. Let's see here. So initially the idea was to have a kit computer by Tandy?

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. I'm not sure whose idea that was. It made some kind of sense. Because that's the way the Altair was, and Radio Shack did sell a number of kits, but in the process of still kicking that around, saying it could be a possibility. I was one of the ones that said it could be a possibility.

    Within the same group that I did the design work from, they also would take kits in that people had built and troubleshoot the things if they didn't work. We had a couple engineers that would see if you connected something wrong or something.  If you didn't, sometimes it was a matter that the instructions weren't clear.

    If you tell someone to put an LED in, yeah. You specifically have to tell them which way to put it in. And \might be an opportunity to tweak your timing. Yeah. Anyway, we get this clock in, and it was a digital clock. Seven segment LEDs probably cost 50 bucks or more.

    Which is crazy. But It says, put all the components in the board, turn the board over, and solder everything to the board. And, pretty simple instructions. This had a sheet of solder over the entire bottom of the board. Someone figured out how to put two pounds of solder on the back of this thing.

    And, as we all got a great chuckle out of that, You realize, oh, you don't want to have to deal with a computer like this. You really don't. And Lou Kornfeld, who was the president at the time, didn't really want the computer. But he said, it's not going to be a kit. All right. That, that, that took care of that.

    great idea. Great idea. 

    Randy Kindig: Were there any other times when you thought the computer might, or were there any times, when you thought the computer might not come to fruition? Any snags that you had that made you think that maybe this isn't going to work? 

    Steve Leininger: Not really. I was young and pretty well undaunted.

    Randy Kindig: Pretty sure you could, 

    Steve Leininger: yeah I, it wasn't any, it wasn't any different than building one at home. I'd been building kits since, night kits, heath kits, that kind of stuff, since I was a kid. And home brewed a couple things, including a hot dog cooker made from two nails and a couple wires that plugged into the wall.

    Don't try that at home. 

    Randy Kindig: No kidding. 

    Steve Leininger: But, it's funny if you If you look it up on, if you look that kind of project up on the internet, you can still find a project like that. It's like what's it called? Anvil tossing, where you put gunpowder under an anvil, shoot it up in the air.

    What could possibly go wrong? Don't, 

    Randy Kindig: It's very well documented in books like Priming the Pump, Stan Veit's book, which I assume you're familiar with, and Fire in the Valley, what your involvement was with the Model 1. But there was some mention of your involvement with the Expansion Interface and other TRS 80 projects.

    What else did you work on while you were there? 

    Steve Leininger: The Color Computer, the Expansion Interface. The model three to a little. 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. 

    Steve Leininger: Little bit. The model two was the big one. And point I just got tired of the management there. 

    Randy Kindig: Did you? Okay. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. I my mind was going faster than theirs, and they made the conscious decision to do whatever IBM has done, but do it cheaper. That, to me, that's not a. Didn't say less expensively either, so the whole thing just troubled me that, we're not going to be able to do anything new unless IBM has done it.

    And at about the same time the Macintosh came out and a superb piece of work. Yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. So what education training and previous work experience did you have at the time you got hired by Tandy that made you uniquely qualified for that project that they were looking for? 

    Steve Leininger: I'd been playing around with electronics since I was in the third grade.

    Actually, electricity. 

    Randy Kindig: The third grade, wow. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. My, my mom got me a kit that had light bulbs and bells and buzzers and wire from, I think it might have been the Metropolitan Museum. They had a kit. They, they've got a, they still today have an online presence. It, of course the materials have changed, but the kit had all these parts and it had no instructions.

    And I don't know if that was by design or it didn't have instructions, so I had to learn how to hook up wires and light bulbs and bells and switches to make it do things. And, in the process, I found out that if you put a wire right across the battery terminals, it gets hot. And, interesting stuff to know.

    Pretty soon, I was taking this stuff in to show and tell in the third grade. Look, and I was very early in electronics. It's electricity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then my mom would take me to the library. She was quite a voracious reader, and I'd go to the library. technical section specifically the Dewey Decimal 621, which was electronics and things like that.

    Randy Kindig: you still remember that. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. And in the 590 series, there's some good stuff too. And I would usually take out a stack of books, even though I was a horrible reader because I'm dyslexic and ADD. So I have an attention span and reading problem. But the technical stuff I was reading about pipeline architecture processors while I was still in junior high.

    And not that was important to where I ended up, but it was important because I understood the words and data flow, and stuff like that. And between that and building the kits and things like that, I When we moved to Indianapolis, my dad moved jobs down to Indianapolis.

    Randy Kindig: Oh, you lived in Indianapolis? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. So I moved from South Bend down to Indianapolis. So I probably passed your house as . Actually we came down through Kokomo, but but yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: I actually grew up in that part of the state. Just south of South Bend. 

    Steve Leininger: Okay. So yeah La Paz, Plymouth, 

    Randy Kindig: yeah, Warsaw, Rochester. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, I was born in Rochester. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. So that's where I grew up in that area. 

    Steve Leininger: Okay, there you go. My dad's from Akron. 

    Randy Kindig: Are you serious? 

    Steve Leininger: I am serious. 

    Randy Kindig: Akron's where my wife grew up. And I was just 10 miles from there. 

    Steve Leininger: The general store there, Dan Leininger and Sons, that's my great grandfather.

    Randy Kindig: Really? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: I'll be darned. Okay. Okay. 

    Steve Leininger: So now it all makes sense. 

    Randy Kindig: That's amazing. 

    Steve Leininger: Anyway, we started a garage band. This is before Apple's garage band. And I made my own amplifier. It basically had the sun sun amplifiers back end on the thing and a Fender Showman front end on it.

    Completely home brewed really loud amplifier. And I had a friend who had a guitar amplifier that was broken, and he had taken it down to the music store there. And after six weeks of not getting it back, they said we've had trouble with our technician and all that. I asked if I could go down and look at it, and in 15 minutes I had his amplifier fixed. And they said, do you want tom so you want a job? All right. Yeah, because I'd been doing, I'd had a paper route before and I don't think I was doing anything since we'd moved and ao I started working in a music store and they ended up with two music stores and then an organ store next door and I started repairing that kind of stuff.

    And this was the end of my first year in college. Went to the extension in Indianapolis. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. And Was that I U P U I? 

    Steve Leininger: IUPUI, yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, I U P U I. 

    Randy Kindig: Huh. I went there as well. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah and learned Fortran there, got all my first year classes out, and then moved on up to the campus.

    And because we'd always go to the library, and because my mom would often take me to the library, the newsstand not too far from the library, and she'd get a couple magazines, but she let me get an electronic magazine. And, I didn't understand these things, pretty soon you start understanding the pic, you start understanding it.

    This is a resistor, I built a little shocker box based on a design in probably elementary electronics. And It's like a handheld electric fence. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, wow. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. Think hot dog cooker. Anyway, so I learned some electronics that way. A lot of that was self taught.

    I learned quite a bit more by working in the music store, again, this was before I was taught any formal electronics. And actually when I moved up to campus on Purdue, I thought I was going to be a world class guitar amplifier designer. That's where I thought. And it turns out my analog gut feelings aren't, weren't as good as other people's.

    Paul Schreiber does a much better job with electronics, with analog electronics than I do. But digital electronics, I understood this stuff. I would hang out in the library and I'd read the trade magazines. So I was up to date on, I was way more up to date than a typical professor would be on current electronics.

    And in 1973, which was the end of my junior year, Electronics Magazine had an article on the Intel 8008. And I said, Oh, I understand this. See, I'd already been taking assembly language. Now they didn't teach assembly language programming in the electronics school. They had Fortran, but there was no way to get from Fortran to ..they weren't teaching programming languages. I had to go to the business school where I learned assembly language on the school's CDC 6600 mainframe. 

    Randy Kindig: Really? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. 

    Randy Kindig: Through the business school? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. And for those of you who have never tried assembly language programming, it looks like a foreign language until you just internalize it in your brain: there's ADD, A D and A D C for ADD with carry, and there's a whole bunch of different things.

    There's different ways to move data around, but you're only doing a few really basic things, and if you do it fast enough, it looks like it's instantaneous. That's the way even your phone works today. It's because you're doing it fast enough. It fools you. 

    Randy Kindig: Yep.

    Wow. Do you ever look back at these days, at those days, with amazement? As far as how far the industry has come? 

    Steve Leininger: Oh yeah. And, it's funny because you wouldn't, you couldn't probably, but you wouldn't start over again. I had to learn, I had to learn digital video. Actually the giant that I, whose shoulders I stood on there was the late Don Lancaster.

    He had a book called TV Typewriter Cookbook. And actually that came out a little bit later, but he had a TV typewriter series in Radio Electronics Magazine. And basically alphanumeric display. If you think about it, just the glass teletype, the keyboard display and a serial interface at the time that the RadioShack computer came out was selling for 999.

    Another 400 on top of what we were selling the whole computer for. Because we had a microprocessor in there. We didn't have a whole lot of options. We didn't have a whole lot of fluff. In fact Motorola said, send this to your schematics and your parts list and let's see if we can minimize your circuit.

    And after two weeks they sent it back. He said, you did a pretty good job here. . . 

    Randy Kindig: Okay. Huh. You still stay in touch with people at Tandy? 

    Steve Leininger: A few of them. It's actually been more lately. Because it's almost more interesting now. It's like the, I don't know whatever happened to Atwater and Kent, of the Atwater Kent radio.

    But, that's an old school radio that now you've got people that rebuild them and got them all polished up and all this kind of stuff. But for a while they ended up in the dump. I'm sure, there are some trash 80s that ended up in the trash. 

    Randy Kindig: I'm sure. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah but I've gotten rid of lots of PCs that don't meet my needs anymore, right?

    Randy Kindig: Sure. Yeah, we all have, somewhere along the way. It seemed like you were really quiet there for a long time and that you were difficult to get in contact with.

    Steve Leininger: I wasn't really that difficult. I didn't maintain a social media presence on the thing, but things that I had my own consulting company for quite a while.

    I actually came back to Radio Shack two more times after I left. One was to come back as a technologist there. The politics still didn't work out well. Then I came back as a contractor to help them with some of their online things. I actually had a website called Steve's Workbench.

    Steve Leininger: And you can find it on the Internet Archive. The Wayback Machine. And it had some basic stamp projects. And we were going to do all sorts of other things. But I managed to upset the people at RadioShack. com. They didn't have a big sense of humor about someone being critical about the products that they'd selected.

    And I, I did a... I was going to start doing product reviews on the kits, how easy it was to solder, whether it was a good value for the money and all that kind of stuff. And I gave a pretty honest review on it. And Radio Shack didn't appreciate the power of an honest review.

    It's what makes Amazon what it is, right? You go in there and if there's something that's got just two stars on the reviews, Yeah, you really got to know what you're doing if you're going to buy the thing, right? And if you see something that's got a bunch of one star and a bunch of five star reviews Yeah, someone's probably aalting the reference at the top end.

    And so I mean they had such a fit that when they changed platforms For RadioShack. com, they didn't take Steve's Workbench with it And I basically lost that position. Radio Shack should own the makerspace business right now. They at one time, one time I suggested, you ought to take a look at buying Digikey or maybe Mouser.

    Mouser was right down the street from us. They already had their hands into Allied, but these other two were doing stuff, more consumer oriented, but they didn't. They were making, they were flush with money from selling cell phone contracts. And they thought that was the way of the future until the cell phone companies started reeling that back in.

    At a certain point, you don't want to be paying your 5 percent or 10 percent royalty to Radio Shack for just signing someone up. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. Okay. I didn't realize you had ever gone back and worked for them again. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, twice, 

    Randy Kindig: and so I'm curious, did you meet any other famous figures in the microcomputer revolution while you were working at Tandy? 

    Steve Leininger: At Tandy, let's see. 

    Randy Kindig: I'm just curious. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, Bill Gates, of course. I went out when we were working on level two BASIC. And Bill Gates I think was probably a hundred- thousand- aire at that time.

    And, working in a, thhey had a floor in a bank building in Seattle. He took me to the basement of his dad's law firm, and we had drinks there, and I went out to his house on the lake. This was not the big house. I've never been there. It was a big house on the lake, but it wasn't the one That he built later on.

    So I knew him early on run across Forest Mims a couple times. And of course, he's the shoulders upon which a lot of electronic talent was built and some of the stuff is lost. Jameco is actually bringing him back as a… Jameco is a kinda like a Radio Shack store online. It's yeah it is, it's not as robust as DigiKey or Bower, but they've held their roots.  Someone I've not met Lady Ada from Adafruit would be fun. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah. Would, yeah. 

    Steve Leininger: I, that, that's another thing that, if we had something along those lines, that would have been cool, but the buyers weren't up, up to the task and they when you don't want criticism at a certain point you've got to quit doing things if you don't want to be criticized. 

    Randy Kindig: Sure. When you finally got the Model 1 rolled out and you saw the tremendous interest, were you surprised in the interest that it garnered? 

    Steve Leininger: I wasn't. I wasn't. In fact, there's a quote of me. Me and John Roach had a discussion on how many of these do you think we could sell? And, this is actually quoted in his obituary on the, in the Wall Street Journal. I, Mr. Tandy said you could build 3, 500 of these because we've got 3, 500 stores and we can use them in the inventory.

    And to take inventory. And John Roach thought maybe we could sell, up to 5, 000 of these things in the first year. And I said, oh no, I think we could sell 50, 000. To which he said, horseshit. Just like that. And that, now I quoted that to the Wall Street Journal, and they put that in his obituary.

    Yeah I don't know how many times that word shows up in the Wall Street Journal, but if you search their files you'll find that it was me quoting John Roach. So …

    Randy Kindig: I'll have to, I'll have to look for that, yeah, that's funny. So you were not surprised by the interest, 

    Steve Leininger: no, it, part of it was I knew the leverage of the stores I'd been working, when we introduced the thing I'd been working for the company for just over a year.

    Think about that. And it wasn't until just before probably, it was probably September or October when Don and I agreed on the specs. I'd keep writing it up, and he'd look at it. Don actually suggested that, demanded, he doesn't, in a, but in a good natured way, he made a good case for it, that I have, in addition to the cassette interface on there, that I have a way to read and write data.

    Because if you're going to do an accounting program, you got to be able to read and write data. I actually figured out a way to do that. There were a couple other things. John Roach really wanted blinking lights on the thing. And my mechanical, the mechanical designer, there said that's going to cost more money to put the LEDs in there.

    What are you going to do with them? And, Mr. Roach was, you know, familiar with the IBM probably the 360 by then? Anyway. The mainframes. Yeah, mainframes always had blinking lights on them. 

    Randy Kindig: Exactly. 

    Steve Leininger: And since it's a computer, it should have blinking lights. And Larry said, Larry the mechanical guy said what are you going to do with them?

    I said, I can't, I said I could put stuff up there, It's…

    Randy Kindig: What are they going to indicate? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. And then, he said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to make the case without holes for the lights and just don't worry about it. That was the end of the discussion.

    Mr. Roach was probably a little disappointed, but yeah, no one else had them, 

    Randy Kindig: it's funny to think that you'd have blinking lights on a microcomputer like that. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any aspect of the Model one development you would do differently if you were doing it today? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, I would, I would've put the eighth memory chip in with the, with the video display so you get upper and lower case.

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, there you go. Okay. 

    Steve Leininger: Might've put buffers to the outside world. We had the, the microprocessor was buffered, but it was, it was very short distance off the connector there. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot I would have changed. Software could have been written a little better, but when one person's writing all the software the development system that I had was a Zilog development system.

    And 30 character percent a second. Decorator, line printer. The fact that I got it done is actually miracle stuff. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, and you got it done in a year, right? 

    Steve Leininger: And it was all written in assembly language. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Got it all done in a year. 

    Randy Kindig: That's a good year's work.

    Steve Leininger: It is. 

    Randy Kindig: Building a computer from scratch, basically, and then getting it... 

    Steve Leininger: and back then we had to program EEPROMs. We didn't have flash memory. Okay. Didn't hardly have operating systems back then. Not that I was using one. There was something in the Zilog thing, but yeah we were so far ahead of things, we were developing a product rather than a computer.

    And maybe that's the whole difference is that we had a product that you pull it up, plug it in, and it says these are TRS 80 and it wasn't the Model 1 until the Model 2 came out. 

    Randy Kindig: Yeah, exactly. It was just the TRS 80. Yeah. So I have to know, do you have any of the old hardware?

    Steve Leininger: I've got a Model 1. I don't use it except for demonstrations now. I actually have two. I've got one that works and one that's probably got a broken keyboard connector from taking it out of the case and holding it up too many times. 

    Randy Kindig: Were these prototypes or anything? 

    Steve Leininger: They are non serial production units. I've got the, I've got a prototype ROM board that's got the original integer basic that I wrote. I don't have the video boards and all that kind of stuff that went with it when we did the original demonstration. Let's see we had four wire wrapped, completely wire wrapped industrial wire wrapped versions that we used for prototyping the software.

    One went to David Lein, who wrote the book that came with the thing, the basic book. One I had at my desk and there were two others. Yeah. And they got rid of all of those. So a cautionary tale is if you do something in the future where you've got that prototype that was put together in Tupperware containers or held together with duct tape, you need to at least take pictures of it.

    And you might want to keep one aside. If it turns out to be something like the Apple III, you can probably get rid of all that stuff. If it turns out to be something like the Apple II, The RadioShack computer, the Commodore PET, you really ought to, enshrine that. The original iPhone. Apple did stuff that was, what was it, can't remember what it was. They had a they had a thing not unlike the... 3Com ended up getting them. Anyway the hand of the PDAs, no one knows what a Personal Oh, digital assistant. Yeah. Yeah. We call that a, we call that a phone ... 

    Randy Kindig: Palm Pilot. Yeah. 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah. Palm Pilot. That's the one. Yeah. I've got a couple of those. I've got three model 100’s. I've got one of the early…

    Randy Kindig: Did you work on the 100s?

    Steve Leininger: I used it, but I didn't work on it. The design. No. Okay. That was an NEC product with Radio Shack skins on it. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, that's right. That's right. 

    Steve Leininger: Kay Nishi was the big mover on that. Yeah. Let's see I've got an Altair and an ASR 33 Teletype. Yeah, we're talking about maybe the computer's grandfather, right?

    I've had a whole bunch of other stuff. I've probably had 40 other computers that I don't have anymore. I am gravitating towards mechanical music devices, big music boxes, that kind of stuff. 

    Randy Kindig: Oh, okay. Cool. Interesting. Steve, that's all the questions I had prepared.

    Steve Leininger: Okay. 

    Randy Kindig: Is there anything I should have asked about that? 

    Steve Leininger: Oh my, 

    Randy Kindig: anything you'd want to say? 

    Steve Leininger: Yeah, I, I've given talks before on how do you innovate? How do you become, this is pioneering kinds of stuff. So you really have to have that vision, man. The vision, I can't exactly say where the vision comes from, but being dyslexic for me has been a gift. Okay and this is something I tell grade school and middle school students that, some people are out there saying I, I can't do that because, it's just too much stuff or my brain is cluttered.

    Cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what's an empty desk the sign of? Embrace the clutter. Learn a lot of different things. Do what you're passionate about. Be willing to. support your arguments, don't just get angry if someone doesn't think the way you do, explain why you're doing it that way.

    And sometimes it's a matter of they just don't like it or they don't have the vision. The ones that don't have the vision, they never, they may never have the vision. I've quit companies because of people like that. But When you've got the vision and can take it off in your direction, it could just end up as being art.

    And I shouldn't say just art, art can be an amazing thing. And that behind these walls here, we've got a pinball machine and gaming conference going on. And it is nutcase. But is there stuff out there you look at and say, Oh, wow. Yeah. And I do too. Keep it a while going.

    Randy Kindig: Very cool. All right. That's a great stopping point, I think. All right. I really appreciate it, Steve taking the time to talk with us today. 

    Steve Leininger: Thanks, Randy.

     

    30 August 2024, 5:23 pm
  • 1 hour 18 minutes
    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:

    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

    Upcoming Shows

    Interview with Paul Terrell

    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.

    31 July 2024, 3:07 pm
  • 1 hour 9 minutes
    Floppy Days 140 - Paul Terrell Interview - The Byte Shop Part 1

    Episode 140 - Interview with Paul Terrell, The Byte Shop - Part 1

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    Hello, and welcome to episode 140 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for June, 2024.  I am Randy Kindig, your guide to this journey through vintage computer goodness.

    This month I’m bringing you another interview episode.  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.  I’ve had an earlier introductory interview with Paul where numerous topics were covered in a more general manner.  I also talked with Paul about his time at Exidy working on the sorcerer computer.  In this interview, we focus primarily on The Byte Shop, how it got started, what it was like, and much more.  Through several conversations with Paul, the interview ran quite long, so this is part I of The Byte Shop discussion.  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.

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    Transcription of Interview-only

    Randy Kindig: All right. Today I'm with Paul Terrell. Paul, today we wanted to talk about the Byte Shop and, exactly what happened with that, how it got started, a lot of things about it. So maybe we could just kick it off by how did the idea of the Byte Shop come about and, how did that kind of get started?

    Paul Terrell: Okay, yeah basically I had a rep company called Repco in Mountain View, California. I started Repco in 1975, the beginning of the year and January sort of frame. Uh, with Repco it's a manufacturer's rep representative sales representative in a geographic territory. And Boyd and I had our partnership company for Northern California, Northern Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

    Paul Terrell: And then there was also another territory, the electronic rep association divides the country up into about 26 different geographical areas and then people, can join the ERA and become members of the ERA. Reps in those territories and with the association they have contractual information and they provide contact information with different manufacturers and such.

    Paul Terrell: With Repco we're selling electronic products, but mainly, different kind of instruments, multimeters from companies that manufactured that, and companies would use reps when they were just getting started out and they couldn't afford to have direct sales people and offices all over the country.

    Paul Terrell: So they would hire a rep and typically pay about, oh, anywhere from 5 to 10 percent commission on sales that happened in that territory. And Boyd and I we're carrying power supply companies and instrument companies. One day I got a phone call from one of my customers at Stanford research facility in Palo Alto, California, and he was saying that he had just read about an Altair computer that used a 8080 Intel processor chip, and he was wondering why the products he was buying from me were costing so much.

    Paul Terrell: And basically the Altair computer was on the cover of Popular Electronics, and so he went ahead and ordered one of these.  They were for sale, mail order, and so I told him that I personally didn't believe that it could be sold for $439, I believe was the mail order price for this and it was in kit form rather than an assembled and tested computer.

    Paul Terrell: I told him that I thought that, basically that product was a paper tiger, and it would never really show up and that he should continue to buy the Intel processor cards from the company that we were representing, which was Prolog down in Monterey, California. And about a month later I got another phone call from this guy and he said “Hey, Paul”, he said, “if you're free for lunch, come on over because the paper tiger has arrived at Stanford Research and we're taking a look at it.”

    Paul Terrell: I went over there and sure enough, there was a computer and it did have a true Intel 8080 microprocessor chip included in there. And quite honestly it had a very professional Optima rack mounted case up that was part of the kit product.And so they were going to have to assemble the unit themselves, but to the computer, it it looked very much like a Data General with panel controls and lights and things and once again, rack mountable. And I got the information out of the documentation that they had received there with the product. And as soon as I got back to the office, I called MITS down in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And talked to Ed Roberts, who was the founder and the CEO of the company.

    Paul Terrell: And told Ed about my company Repco. He was changing his company from mail order four function calculators to these what he was calling a microcomputer and a personal computer. And I told them that, something as complicated as a computer, he’s going to have feet on the street for people to explain how this computer works and support the the product because it was a lot more sophisticated and capable than the four function calculator kits he was using, presently selling, and he agreed with me and invited me to come down to Albuquerque and talk to him about how he might be able to set up a sales rep organization nationwide because that was his intention.

    Paul Terrell: And he was getting all kinds of checks in the mail from people all over the country that had read this article and. And literally we're just sending off checks and ordering these kits. And he had a pretty tremendous back order at the time. Boyd and I contacted some of the reps that sold products like the Prologue and Control Instruments that we were representing.  And we were attempting to get other territories lined up for MITS so that he would have the kind of support that he wanted in the sales organization.

    Paul Terrell: And that's basically how we got introduced to personal computing and The Altair computer, and of course when we went down to Albuquerque to meet with Ed, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were at the premises. They had a little office on Route 40 going through the center of Albuquerque, and it was just one of those little strip centers that you see with retail stores and offices and we sat down with Ed, signed the contracts, signed up our territory for ourselves. And then, gave contact information that we had to bring more reps across the country on board and gave them some, information that made feel that these people could do a good job for him and he saw the products we were carrying and how they fit with the personal computer and Altair.

    Paul Terrell: We got the contract signed. We started to represent MITS and the Altair and what we did in the initial stages of it there was a group in Palo Alto that was meeting at Stanford's linear accelerator called Homebrew Computer Club. And this was a group of guys that, worked in the industry and that we were selling to. We were interested in joining the Homebrew Club and going to the meetings, and once again, basically representing MITS to the audience there and answering questions.

    Randy Kindig: Paul, did the Byte Shop actually exist yet? Was that an entity yet?

    Paul Terrell: No, no. The Byte Shop didn't exist at that time. It was just the rep company Repco. Uh, we had an office in mountain view, California. We were calling on all of the, aerospace companies and universities in the Northern California Bay Area as well as Oregon and Washington and Idaho. We would take trips up there to University of Oregon, University of Washington and then once again, anywhere where our manufacturing people had done some advertising, and people would fill out cards and information to get more product.

    Paul Terrell: And Boyd and I would show up on their doorstep and show them a demonstration of the product and sell it to them and get our commission. So that's how all of that kind of stuff worked at the time. And the computer stores there was no such thing. At the time nobody had thought about doing computer retail because, of course, there, there was no retail consumer pricing available.

    Paul Terrell: There were no computers. There were very few products that were even showing up in magazines or like the popular electronics. And so forth.  And these the computers that were out there Intel was just introducing their 8080 microprocessor chip. The first eight bit computer chip that they manufactured was the 8008.

    Paul Terrell: And the 4004 was a 4 bit computer chip, and then they went to the 4040 and the 8080, and that was a more advanced instruction set. And with one of our manufacturers, Prolog, we were actually teaching engineers and actually anybody that was interested in coming to our seminars.

    Paul Terrell: Prolog would have seminars on designing with a programmed logic design versus the traditional electronic chip designs that were going on by people making products with the semiconductor devices that were out there from companies like Texas Instrument and National Semiconductor and so forth. So the microprocessor was the heart of this thing.

    Paul Terrell: And it was really changing the way people were designing products so they had to learn about programmed logic design and how to do it and, of course, have the components available from the various manufacturers. And, once Intel had introduced everybody else started to get into the business Fairchild Instruments came out with the F8 microprocessor, Chip National Semiconductor came out with the SC/MP microprocessor.

    Paul Terrell: And so forth. So the industry was transforming at the component level. And of course with the heart of the product becoming a computer. Everybody else had to adapt to this new philosophy of electronic design and all the way up through aerospace companies.

    Paul Terrell: And then, of course, universities were always interested in and teaching new technologies to the students and so forth.

    Randy Kindig: You mentioned Boyd Wilson, right? He was your partner in a lot of this stuff at the time, right?And I know you're just getting ready to get into exactly how the Byte shop came about.

    Randy Kindig: So I'll just let you go there.

    Paul Terrell: Okay. Yeah, Boyd and I, basically, it was the two of us with a secretary bookkeeper that would answer the phones and take messages and so forth. And we would just travel around our territories.I had the peninsula of San Francisco and Boyd had the East Bay and so we split up our areas and we'll call on customers that way and what happened with the advent of computer retailing was that MIT has had a convention that they were holding in Albuquerque and they were bringing the reps and they invited the public to to come to Albuquerque to a private convention that they were holding at their facilities, and they had just moved from that little strip center on Route 40 out to an industrial park by the airport, and so they were showing off their new facilities.

    Paul Terrell: To everybody and anybody that was interested and of course, one of the things they were doing at this conference was to invite the people that had done some things with the Altair computer to bring the products and show off what it was capable of doing. Everybody, uh, showed up in Albuquerque at the I think they called it the WAC, the World Altair Computer Convention, WACC, and, once again the the people at MITS, when they were putting these kits together and they started to actually offer assembled computers as well.

    Paul Terrell: So part of this facility was dedicated to manufacturing Altair computers. But the majority of their sales were in the kits because all they had to do is bag parts and provide documentation to the technicians that were buying these things and the hobbyists and putting them together, and which was a very inexpensive process for them and provided them a lot of profit margin in the kit product.

    Paul Terrell: Whereas when they got into the assembly of the computers, that was much more complicated. They had to hire a technical staff that could fix these products. And as they came down the production lines, and of course, it took a lot longer to take that check from the customer and. And provide a product for him.

    Paul Terrell: When we went to the world convention at MITS we were introduced to other startup companies that were making products that would plug into the Altair computer and provide other capabilities. A good example of this is a company called Cromemco, which had a color a video card that would plug into an Altair computer, and it was called the Dazzler, and you could actually program them.

    Paul Terrell: Color graphics for an application. You might have with a Dazzler card and Heuristic Systems had a voice recognition card that they had provided. So you could see that these hobbyists and people out there were starting companies. To create other products to to go with this personal computer.

    Paul Terrell: And uh, the marketplace was starting to mature with more than one manufacturer. The people at Cromemco actually focused in on the more professional side of computing and built a ruggedized version of the Altair computer that Boyd and I were selling to the state of California, and the engineers at in Sacramento were using those computers for the ramp controllers on the interstate highways and also on the canal system that they had built had controlled the water flow from all of the dams in California. So there were some serious applications that were happening and companies that were being formed to address those kinds of markets.

    Paul Terrell: Processor Technology was another company that originally started making cards. They had a serial board that you could plug into if you wanted to attach your Altair to a modem and communicate over the phone lines with other computers and they eventually created the processor technology SOL computer; so I could see that the industry was growing to the point where you could have more than one manufacturer You could have a number of manufacturers and of course at Repco, we approach these companies to represent their products as well.

    Paul Terrell: And but what happened at the Altair meeting that we had in Albuquerque was Ed Roberts had told us that one of the customers in the Los Angeles area was starting a computer store. It was Dick Heiser and his wife, who worked for RAND Corporation, down by the L. A. airport had opened up a Arrowhead computer store on Sepulveda Boulevard, and he was selling the kits to the public in this computer store, and so it told us that when we got back to our territories after the convention that we should try and identify customers of that sort, rather than the types of people that were presently buying the products. And so I asked that at the meeting what could we offer a retailer for for getting into that business?  And he said he was giving Dick a 25% discount on his computers. And that was his purchase price. And the Sales reps, we were all getting 5 percent for all of the MITS products that shipped into our territory. And so on the way to the airport, I asked Boyd what was going to be the name of the computer store, because 5% plus 25% was 30%, and I much prefer the 30% margin from 5%.  When we got on the plane, I had picked up a magazine at the airport, it was called Byte Magazine, and it was from a company in New Hampshire, that was one of the new startup companies in this personal computer industry.

    Paul Terrell: They were in the magazine business and they were following the hobbyist market. And there, there were a number of new magazines that were coming out at the time uh, to join people like Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics. Which had been around in the CB radio market and addressing hobby people and electronics engineers and technicians and so forth.

    Paul Terrell: And so Byte magazine was on the racks on and we should call the store that we were going to start in Northern California, the Byte Shop. And people would think that maybe we were associated with the magazine and it would give us some factor for Byte Shop. so That was our plan. And when we landed it took me about 3 months to go from our Repco office complex to the Mountain View area that had good visibility in retail.  They say that the three rules are location, location and location.  The highway, the road, that goes from San Jose all the way up to San Francisco is called El Camino Real, the King's Highway, and parallels the Highway 101, which was the, connector for everybody that and of course, it also parallels the the railroad tracks for all the commuters and so forth.

    Paul Terrell: So I decided that El Camino real was where the Byte Shop should be located and we should have a, we should find a place. So it was about a thousand square feet and had good visibility to the road that we could shoot our products and that's what we found at 1063 West El Camino in Mountain View, California.

    Paul Terrell: That's where the original Byte Shop was, number one, was.  I opened that on my birthday in 1975, December 8th, 1975. We introduced the Byte Shop to the world.

    Randy Kindig: Boyd was your partner in this when you started that or was he not?

    Paul Terrell: Yeah. Yeah. This was a this was a spinoff of Repco the rep company agreement that we had.

    Paul Terrell: And eventually we would incorporate, uh, Byte Incorporated, ran the dealership program that we put together when we expanded the stores. It also encompassed Byte manufacturing, because we actually created our own computer. Compatible to the Altair computer, compatible to the Cromemco, compatible to processor technology.

    Paul Terrell: It's becoming the standard in the personal computer industry. Everybody was designing their products to be plug compatible to the what they call the S100 Bus that Ed Roberts had originally designed in his first Altair computer. We, corporation-wise, we had different operations going and so we were expanding our facilities as well.

    Paul Terrell: We went from… Boyd actually ran the rep company once the Byte shop got started it got my full time, so it was hiring other people to go on sales calls for my territory. plus we had 13 different manufacturers that we were selling products for. But my focus was totally on the personal computer business. I was going to all of the home brew computer meetings that were being held.

    Paul Terrell: And so eventually my office moved from the office in Mountain view of Repco to the Byte Shop. The idea originally was that being in the electronics industry we would go to all of the events that were happening and there were a couple of major conventions that were that we would go to annually, the fall joint and spring joint computer conferences, and those conferences were focused on people that were in the computer industry.

    Paul Terrell: These are companies that are in the computer business or needing computers, they would go to these conventions to see what was new and available to them. Obviously, the university people were invited to these shows and these were shows where you had to pay hundreds of dollars to get admission and you had to be qualified to even get into the show.

    Paul Terrell: So there was no way that the general public had any kind of a show that they could go to , so hence here's another opportunity for the entrepreneurs out there. There was a company in San Francisco that did a show called the country fair and that was a a show that was created once again because personal computers became an industry.

    Paul Terrell: And so just as there was an opportunity in the magazine business, there was an opportunity in retailing, there was also an opportunity in publishing with the magazines and now show business. For me once again, since the shows before computer fair started, the shows were you had to be qualified and working in the industry to even see the products. It occurred to me that I had an opportunity with the Byte shops like Barnum and Bailey created this expression called the “greatest show on earth” when it came to town. And so I saw an opportunity when the Byte shop came to town to create the greatest show in town which which was computers in your Byte shop. And you could come into the store. You could see the products. You could use the demonstration units.

    Paul Terrell: You could have a hands on capability. And so there was a lot of showmanship involved in in putting these stores together because we were trying to educate the general public on what you could do with computers and and give them access to them. So that's what was happening. In the retail area and of course once we started selling the Altair computers to the public and and these other companies we were getting recognition.

    Paul Terrell: And, the idea of retail, I would have customers come in one day and buy a computer from me and then come back a couple of weeks later and say they want to open a store what was the opportunity for them to be the Byte shop of Campbell, California or the Byte shop of Palo Alto and or the Byte shop of Santa Clara.

    Paul Terrell: So it occurred to me that this computer retail thing could become very much like what Radio Shack was doing. Their electronics parts stores and the different products they were offering to the public and at the time the products that they were offering were pretty much the CB radio was the big thing for computer hobbyists and electronics people.

    Paul Terrell: Tandy Corporation, the parent of Radio Shacks, they were franchising their stores, they had company owned stores, and they were manufacturing their own brand of radio products under the Realistic name, so you could buy a Radio Shack Realistic CB unit or a cassette player or radio, they had their own private label of products, which gave me the idea that my shops could do the same sort of thing, that we could create our own products there.

    Paul Terrell: and obviously, if we're manufacturing the product, we are the manufacturer, so we get to have the profit margins that are associated with that as well, in terms of a business opportunity for us. As the the Byte shop expanded, we were also competing with other individuals that would open up their store and they didn't feel that there was a value and just like anything else, whether you're the food business or whatever there's branding out there.

    Randy Kindig: So were you aware of other computer stores that were opening around the country? Like, Stan Veit I know was opening one on the East coast, I think shortly after you did and Ray Borrell, the data domain here in Indiana, which is where I'm located so that's why I have an interest there. Were you aware of these other ones were opening up and how did that impact what you were doing?

    Paul Terrell: Yeah it's funny you say that because a lot of those stores were also being created by the the sales reps that were out there, the people that, that we got into the rep business, they obviously saw what Repco was doing with Byte Shops and in our territory. And there were a bunch of other people that from the rep community that opened up stores and there were computer marts, computer shops, computer all sorts of things, data domain, and, once again, some of these people actually came to us and wanted to be a Byte Shop at some point and there was, at some point they decided there wasn't value in it that we weren't offering them enough for them to come in under our label or what have you and some people are just independent. So anyway, but a lot of these people became friends. Stan Veit and I were close friends for a number of years because he got into the magazine business and when he got out of his store and so forth. And of course, the industry changed pretty significantly when IBM came in, it got a lot more serious and, and so forth.

    Paul Terrell: But we basically, my idea was to create a a dealership that would add value and and give somebody a decent return on investment for the business that they were starting, and that's an interesting statement right there.  Return on investment, because we got a lot of publicity at the Byte Shops being there and right in the heart of Silicon Valley and growing our operation there.

    Paul Terrell: There were a lot of people that would come to the West Coast. Charlie Tandy was 1 of them that flew out in his corporate jet and hired the guy that was in charge of national semiconductors, a SC/MP microprocessor, to go to work for him and design the TRS 80. And of course, Charlie, when he was out there, walked all my Byte Shops and saw what was going on, and how we were conducting business, and so forth.

    Paul Terrell: And of course, one of the members of my board of directors, happened to be good friends with Nugent, who was a guy that worked for Tandy and his accounting department back in Dallas, Fort Worth. So we actually got information on his whole franchise program for us to put together our dealership program and I keep referring to our program as a dealership program versus franchise and that's for a very specific reason. Boyd and I actually started Repco with $10,000 apiece, and so we capitalized the rep company at $20,000, and then we're trying to take that business and spin off this new Byte Shop business, or Byte Incorporated, and that was the only capital investment we had in the company, we were basically expanding the operation as we could through the profits that we were making in terms of our dealerships. And the dealership, yeah, franchising is very controlled by the the government, and so there's a lot of rules and laws that you have to follow to to actually get a franchise in the state that you're wanting to operate in so we basically couldn't afford the expense of the lawyers that would be involved in putting a franchise agreement together. And once again, not having any idea how successful computer retailing was going to be we were trying to be very cautious with our money and our investments. So we had created a program where we would… we were actually looking at the tire stores Goodyear, Firestone.  Those are dealerships that sell products out there.

    Paul Terrell: And we were looking and saying those guys are able to skirt the laws of a franchise here. They're they're just dealership. So let's model the Byte Shops after a dealership and we'll charge the 5 percent fee that we get as a rep in the territory. And our fee for a dealership was 5 percent of the gross of the store and that's what people would pay us to be able to use the trademark of Byte Shop, the affordable computer store, and there was also a couple of other things that we did that we wanted. We knew eventually, as we were more profitable and had the money available, we would actually implement a full franchise program, like McDonald's and all the other franchises do out there.

    Paul Terrell: We created kind of a look and feel of the store. We had some graphics that we would put in our demo unit. And it said “one giant step for mankind, the personal computer”. And we were playing off of NASA's landing on the moon sort of thing. We felt that the personal computer was as significant as that sort of thing.

    Paul Terrell: And so we would provide the the wall art for the Byte Shops so that we would have a consistent theme about it, but very careful not to do all of the requirements that would put us in the franchise business.

     

    27 June 2024, 6:29 pm
  • 1 hour 28 minutes
    Floppy Days 139 - Vic Tolomei (Exidy) Interview

    Episode 139 - Interview with Vic Tolomei, VP Software Development, Exidy

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    Hello, and welcome to episode 139 of the Floppy Days Podcast, for May, 2024.

    This month I’m bringing you another interview episode; in the ongoing effort to document the story of Exidy and its Sorcerer computer.  I’ve already talked, in previous episodes, with Howell Ivy and Paul Terrell, both principals at Exidy and in the creation of the Sorcerer computer.  Those were quite popular episodes!  In this episode, I also tracked down Vic Tolomei, VP of Software Development at Exidy during that same time, and got his story.  If you want to know what it was like to lead a software development effort at that time, this is the interview for you!

    Upcoming on the podcast, I have more interviews to share, as well as more hardware to cover.  I’m actually a few months ahead with developing content, which I guess is an advantage of being retired!

    I've created some tiers for paid members and have come up with some ways to reward those who are generous enough to monetarily support the Floppy Days Podcast on Patreon.

    First of all, all tiers ($2/month and up) will receive early access to companion videos for any interviews that are published. The audio will be published to Floppy Days immediately, as usual, while any video will be made available exclusively to all paid members for a period of time (at least 30 days) before the general public. The videos will be published for you on Patreon.com, and then moved to the Floppy Days YouTube channel after the exclusivity period is over.

    Other benefits have been added for the tiers above the minimum $2 tiers, such as Floppy Days merchandise, an audio introduction for supporters, and even the option to co-host an episode!

    It is my intention to always make all content available to everyone at no cost, while at the same time providing some benefits for those generous enough to support the podcast. I hope this is a good compromise.

    Please let me know your thoughts. Enjoy!!

    New Acquisitions

    Upcoming Shows

    Interview Links

    28 May 2024, 4:14 pm
  • 1 hour 32 minutes
    Floppy Days 138 - Interview with Hans Franke, VCF Europe and Computeum

    Episode 138 - Interview with Hans Franke, VCF Europe and Computeum

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    Hello, and welcome to Episode 138 of the Floppy Days Podcast for April, 2024!  My name is Randy Kindig and I host this podcast about beautiful, obsolete, extremely interesting computers of 35 to 45 years ago, when computer diversity was abundant.

    This episode is an interview show, where we talk with Hans Franke. Hans is very active in the classic computer community, being an organizer of the European Vintage Computer show AND curator of a computer museum!  We discuss both of these things with Hans and learn more about the vintage computer scene in Europe.

    I actually have several interviews completed and queued up to publish.  So, while I continue to work on covering the next computer in the timeline, expect several interviews in the near term.  I won’t go into details, but these are great interviews that I think you will enjoy.

    I also wanted to mention those listeners who appreciate the show enough to donate through patreon.com.   I really appreciate you guys and it helps offset the cost of running the podcast.

    What I’ve Been Up To

    New Acquisitions

    Upcoming Shows

    Interview with Hans Franke 

     

    24 April 2024, 7:55 pm
  • Current Year Vintage Computer Show Schedule

    Current Year Vintage Computer Show Schedule

    6 April 2024, 6:18 pm
  • 1 hour 21 minutes
    Floppy Days 137 - Post-VCF SoCal 2024 with Paul Nurminen

    Post-VCF SoCal 2024 with Paul Nurminen

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    0 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 13 sec Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 43 sec Intro 2 min 53 sec bumper - Paul Nurminen 3 min 00 sec Discussion with Paul Nurminen 1 hr 20 min 00 sec Closing

    Hello, and welcome to episode 137 of the Floppy Days Podcast.  I’m Randy Kindig, the host of this show.  This episode is an adjunct to and follow up to the last episode (#136) of Floppy Days.  In that episode, which covered the Grundy New Brain, I alluded to the fact that in the “What I’ve Been Up To” section of the podcast, I was going to publish a separate episode just for that.  I did that because I don’t like to have episodes over about 90 minutes, and having this segment in that show would have pushed it well beyond that.

    So, for this episode I enlisted the aid of Paul Nurminen (aka Nurmix), who was also an attendee and exhibitor/vendor at the recent Vintage Computer Festival Southern California, to help me do a follow up discussion of that show.  We discuss our exhibits, other exhibits of note, our general thoughts about the show, and a whole lot more.

    I hope you enjoy this.

    Links

    11 March 2024, 8:38 pm
  • 1 hour 14 minutes
    Floppy Days 136 - Grundy New Brain Peripherals to Web Sites with Chris Espoinidis

    Grundy NewBrain Peripherals thru Web Sites with Chris Despoinidis

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    0 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 13 sec Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 42 sec Intro 5 min 17 sec bumper - Chris Espoinidis 5 min 28 sec New Acquisitions 6 min 33 sec bumper - Gerald McMullon 7 min 16 sec Upcoming Computer Shows 12 min 01 sec bumper - Steve O’Hara-Smith 12 min 27 sec Peripherals 22 min 37 sec Using the Machine 33 min 14 sec User Groups/Newsletters 38 min 36 sec Books & Manuals 41 min 47 sec Software 44 min 11 sec Ads 46 min 45 sec Modern Upgrades 51 min 43 sec Emulation 59 min 07 sec Buying One Today 1 hr 02 min 52 sec Community 1 hr 04 min 50 sec Current Web Sites and Videos 1 hr 12 min 45 sec Closing

    Hello, and welcome to episode 136 of the Floppy Days Podcast.  I’m Randy Kindig, the host of this show, and I’ll be your guide to a journey back to the year 1982, when a very interesting, low-cost machine entered the market in Great Britain.  This is the final episode on the Grundy New Brain, not a well-known machine, most particularly here in the United States where very few have even heard of it; let alone ever owned one.

    If you want to know more, I’ve recently published interviews with John Grant, Steve O’Hara-Smith, and Gerald McMullon concerning their involvement with the New Brain back in the day.  I also, in the most recent episode, discussed tech specs around the machine with my co-host.

    Regarding that, in that last episode, to help me talk about the machine, I enlisted Chris Espoinidis to co-host this episode.  Chris manages the New Brain Emulator site from his home in Greece.  Even though Chris created one of the premier New Brain emulators in existence, and that was the primary focus of his Web site initially, his site has become one of the best places (along with Gerald McMullon’s Website) to get any and all New Brain information (which quite honestly is quite sparse).

    The focus of this last episode detailing the machine, Chris and I will cover things like peripherals, Web sites, books & magazines, software, using the machine, emulators and all of the topics that have become the standard for machine coverage on Floppy Days.  This episode will complete all the details we know on the New Brain, with the intent to impart every bit of information to you that I could find about this little-known machine.

    Before we do that, I will talk about upcoming shows.

    Upcoming Shows

    Newsletters

    Books and Manuals

    Modern Upgrades

    Emulation

    Buying One Today

    Community

    Current Web Sites/Videos

    References

     

    28 February 2024, 10:48 pm
  • 1 hour 14 minutes
    Floppy Days 135 - Grundy New Brain Tech Specs with Chris Despoinidis

    Grundy NewBrain Tech Specs with Chris Despoinidis

    Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/FloppyDays

    Sponsors:

    0 Floppy Days Tune 1 min 14 sec Vintage Computer Ads 1 min 43 sec Intro 5 min 38 sec bumper - Chris Espoinidis 5 min 51 sec New Acquisitions 16 min 32 sec bumper - Gerald McMullon 17 min 15 sec Upcoming Computer Shows 21 min 26 sec bumper - Steve O’Hara-Smith 21 min 45 sec Interview with Chris Espoinidis 36 min 23 sec Tech Specs 1 hr 12 min 07 sec Closing

    Hello, and welcome to episode 135 of the Floppy Days Podcast.  I’m Randy Kindig, the host of this show, and I’ll be your guide to a journey back to the year 1982, when a very interesting, low-cost machine entered the market in Great Britain.  This machine, if you've been following the show, was the Grundy New Brain.  This is not a well-known machine, most particularly here in the United States where very few have even heard of it; let alone ever owned one.

    As you know, I’ve been hot on the trail of pioneers who were involved with development of this machine.  I’ve recently published interviews with John Grant, Steve O’Hara-Smith, and Gerald McMullon concerning their involvement with the New Brain back in the day.

    In this episode I move more into discussing details of the machine and its impact on the home and small business market in the 1980’s.  To help me talk about the machine, I was able to track down Chris Espoinidis and convince him to co-host this episode.  Chris manages the New Brain Emulator site from his home in Greece.  Even though Chris created one of the premier New Brain emulators in existence, and that was the primary focus of his Web site initially, his site has become one of the best places (along with Gerald McMullon’s Website) to get any and all New Brain information (which quite honestly is quite sparse).

    The focus of this episode, and the next, is to cover things like tech specs, Web sites, emulators and all of the topics that have become the standard for machine coverage on Floppy Days.  This particular episode contains an interview with Chris, and then goes into great detail concerning the technical specifications of the New Brain.  The next episode will cover all the other details, with the intent to impart every bit of information to you that I could find about this little-known machine.

    Before we do that, I will talk about new acquisitions and upcoming shows.

     

    28 January 2024, 7:34 pm
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