• In 1970, Apostol joined with the Doddenhofs of Wiesbaden, Germany who were engaged in marketing various products in Germany. They created A&B Elektronics and began selling simple calculators made by Melcor.
• Melcor bought much of what was left of a Canadian company, Bowmar, and turned out inexpensive units in a Farmingdale, Long Island plant. The chips came primarily from a CMOS plant in Pennsylvania. The financing came from a Bridgeport, Ct. based SBIC.
• Sales boomed in Germany and soon Apostol expanded to other european countries, notably Switzerland, Italy, France, Holland and the UK. He even penetrated the east german market and eventually into the Soviet Union.
• In 1972 Apostol joined with two businessmen in the UK and together with Jack Tramiel formed Commodore Business machines already building a business with calculators in the US.
• The basic four or five function calculator soon gave way to more complex units and eventually a full blown scientific calculator based on the extremely coveted HP Scientific model.
• By 1974, Apostol was doing over a million dollars in sales in Germany through such mass marketers as Neckerman and Qwelle. He was buying the parts for Melcor and receiving the finished product in Germany.
• In 1975, Apostol paid Melcor over $1 million to produce a new Scientific calculator using the latest CMOS chip which he obtained at a cut rate. The objective was to deliver a full featured scientific calculator to the huge student market in Europe at a price under $200. Up until then the units had been priced at $400 or more and were beyond many students’ budget. It was to be called the Melcor 635. The assembly began in April 1975 for delivery to stores in August in time for the start of the academic year. Pre orders were obtained and promotions were in place. However, Melcor began delaying their shipment date.
• Unbeknownst to Apostol, the Melcor 635 scientific calculator had a bug in its trigonometric functions. Because the CORDIC algorithms used in most calculators cannot compute the inverse trigonometric functions of zero, these need to be hardcoded — and some engineer at Melcor got it wrong. For any input other than exactly zero, even for instance 1.0E-99, the calculator worked correctly; the user simply had to remember not to compute the arc-cosine of zero. The company discovered this after making 50,000 calculators to be shipped to Apostol. The upshot was an advertisement in Summer and Fall 1975 issues of such publications as Scientific American and the MIT alumni magazine headlined 'Somebody Goofed', offering these calculators, for which a typical retail price at the time would have been around $99 dollars, for $59.99. It was sold as the SC-645.
• Melcor was unable to recover after this debacle and as the competiton heated up with declining profit margins, Melcor closed and never delivered any calculators to Apostol nor refunded his $1 million payment.
• A&B Elektronics closed in 1975.