Apple Computer fulfilled its first commercial order, delivering fifty Apple I units to Paul Terrell's Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, priced at $500 each. Steve Wozniak had designed the circuit board largely alone, while Steve Jobs handled the business side, having convinced Terrell to place the order. The sale, worth $25,000, provided crucial early capital and validation for what would become one of the world's most valuable companies.
Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop chain, had encountered Steve Wozniak demonstrating his homebrew computer at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto and was intrigued enough to tell Jobs, 'call me.' When Jobs did, Terrell surprised him by ordering fifty fully assembled computers rather than the bare circuit boards Jobs and Wozniak had planned to sell to hobbyists, at $500 apiece.
Jobs and Wozniak scrambled to finance the parts, famously securing a thirty-day trade credit from a parts distributor and enlisting friends and family, including Jobs's sister, to help assemble the boards in the Jobs family garage in Los Altos. By early July they delivered the completed batch, hand-soldered and tested, to Terrell's store.
The Apple I lacked a case, keyboard, monitor, and power supply, requiring buyers to add all of that themselves, but the bare circuit board contained an unusually elegant design that used far fewer chips than competing hobbyist computers. Only about 200 Apple I units were ever built. This first sale gave the fledgling company, incorporated as a partnership just three months earlier on April 1, 1976, both revenue and a foothold in retail electronics that positioned it for the explosive success of the Apple II a year later.