Sorcerer sales worldwide, of around 20,000 units, is comparable to the TRS-80 model II, both targeting Small or Home Business Computer users.

Lacking financial investment from its parent company, which was focused on the coin-operated arcade game market, and which, unlike Apple, did not wish to seek venture capital, the Sorcerer was sold primarily through international distributors and technology licensing agreements.

Paul Terrell was operating RepCo in California, selling power supplies and test instruments to electronics manufacturers.

A suggestion by Ed Roberts of MITS led Paul to start one of the first personal computer stores, the Byte Shop, in 1975.

[2] Prior to selling Byte Shop, Terrell had introduced an S-100 based kit called the Byt8, to be sold alongside the MITS Altair and other S-100 compatible systems.

Terrell, always looking for new ventures, saw a gap in the market for a small business computer that was user-friendly, affordable, came fully equipped, and importantly without the need for any customer-assembly.

At the time, the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 offered the out-of-the-box experience he considered essential, yet the TRS-80 required a costly computer monitor, and both machines had low-resolution graphics capabilities.

The Exidy Sorcerer was competitively priced at $895 and went to market in Long Beach, California in April 1978 and generated a 4,000 unit back-log on introduction.

[3] Export of personal computers was complicated by the requirement of US Government State Department approval but this was more than offset by the financial advantage afforded by the customary export terms of sale under letter of credit, yielding immediate cash, as compared to chasing payments from domestic retailers on 30-day credit terms.

Liveport also eventually designed and built extra plug-in ROM-PAC cartridges and an add-on floppy disk drive (based on Micropolis units) that did not require the expensive S-100 chassis.

One of the largest computing user groups in the Netherlands was the ESGG (Exidy Sorcerer Gebruikers Groep) which published a monthly newsletter in two editions, Dutch and English.

The Sorcerer was successful in Australia as a result of strong promotion by its exclusive agent Dick Smith Electronics, though there was price resistance as it was considered beyond the means of most hobbyists.

The ROM-pac idea came from Howell Ivy's days at Ramtek, where he started working on arcade games before joining Exidy.

The machine included the Zilog Z80 and various bus features needed to run the CP/M operating system; a port of CP/M was done by the four-man software team at Exidy led by Vic Tolomei, in consultation with Digital Research.

A later form factor of the Sorcerer combined the floppies, and a small monitor into a single box, that resembled the TRS-80 model II.

These lower resolutions were a side effect of the inability of the video hardware to read the screen data from RAM fast enough; given the slow speed of the machines they would end up spending all of their time driving the display.

One modification was the addition of single-stroke replacements for common BASIC commands, pressing GRAPHICS-P would insert the word PRINT for instance, allowing for higher-speed entry.

The Montfort Brothers made an EPROM PAC with a rechargeable battery inside and 16 KB RAM with an external write-protect switch.

The System 80 Desktop Computer of 1981 combined the Sorcerer with a 12" display, dot matrix printer and business software, for which the contemporary benchmark was perhaps the Xerox Diablo 3100.

This was followed by the Multi-Net 80 also in 1981, using multiple Winchester disk drives, a centralised "timeshare global module" running MP/M and CP/NET, to which up to 16 Sorcerers with a Terminal ROM-pac inserted could inter-connect.