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Steve Jobs's personally-owned 'Byte Shop'–style wooden Apple-1 case of unusual construction, modified with a vented metal baseplate with rear ports for audio/video out, a power plug, and a fuse; typical Byte Shop cases had wooden rear and bottom panels. The top panel features the standard keyboard cutout. This case was long kept in the attached garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos, famously known as the 'Apple Garage.'
The Apple-1 was originally conceived by Steve Jobs and Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, their initial market being Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club. Seeking a larger audience, Jobs approached Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world. Aiming to elevate the computer beyond the realm of the hobbyist tinkerer, Terrell offered to buy 50 of the computers—at a wholesale price of $500 a piece, to retail at $666.66—but only if they came fully assembled. Jobs and Woz agreed to the deal, setting the stage for Apple's early success.
The Byte Shop cases gave the machines a polished, finished appearance, really setting them apart from typical hobbyist kits of the era; the Apple-1 thus became one of the first ‘personal’ computers which did not require assembly by the end user. Steve Wozniak later placed Terrell's purchase order in perspective: 'That was the biggest single episode in all of the company's history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected.'
This wooden Apple-1 'Byte Shop' case, personally-owned by Steve Jobs and preserved in the now-mythic 'Apple Garage' where Jobs and Wozniak assembled their earliest machines—traces a direct line to Apple’s origin story, bridging the founders' raw ingenuity with the commercial ambition sparked by the Byte Shop order. As both an artifact of Apple’s first product and a survivor of its storied birthplace, this case stands as a tangible witness to the company’s genesis, when a garage-built computer helped ignite the personal computing revolution.
Provenance: from the personal collection of John Chovanec, stepbrother of Steve Jobs.
