Ronald Gerald Wayne

Ronald Gerald Wayne (born May 17, 1934) founded Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) with Steve Wozniak and the late CEO Steve Jobs but soon gave up his share of the new company for a total of $2,300


Biography

Wayne was born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. He worked with Steve Jobs at Atari before he, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. Serving as the venture's "adult supervision", Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men's original partnership agreement,and wrote the Apple I manual.

Wayne received a 10% stake in Apple but relinquished his stock for US$800 less than two weeks later, on April 12, 1976. Legally, all members of a partnership are personally responsible for any debts incurred by any partner; unlike Jobs and Wozniak, 21 and 25, Wayne had personal assets that potential creditors could seize. The failure of a slot machine company that he had started five years earlier also contributed to his decision to exit the partnership.

Later that year, venture capitalist Arthur Rock and Mike Markkula helped develop a business plan and convert the partnership to a corporation. Wayne received another check, for $1,500, for his agreement to forfeit any claims against the new company. In its first year of operations (1976), Apple's sales reached US$174,000. In 1977, sales rose to US$2.7 million, in 1978 to US$7.8 million, and in 1980 to US$117 million. By 1982 Apple had a billion dollars in annual sales. He claimed that he did not regret selling the stock as he had made the "best decision with the information available to me at the time."

Wayne also stated that he felt the Apple enterprise "would be successful, but at the same time there would be bumps along the way and I couldn't risk it. I had already had a rather unfortunate business experience before. I was getting too old and those two were whirlwinds. It was like having a tiger by the tail and I couldn't keep up with these guys."}} Had he kept his 10% stock it would be worth over 35 billion dollars today (August 2011).

After Apple, Wayne resisted Jobs's attempts to recruit him back to Apple, remaining at Atari until 1978 when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later a Salinas, California electronics company.He is retired and sells stamps, rare coins, and gold from his Pahrump, Nevada home, and had never owned an Apple product until September 5, 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 by Aral Balkan at the Update Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.

Wayne also ran a stamp shop in Milpitas, California for a short period of time in the late '70s, "Wayne's Philatelics", on Dempsey Road. After a number of break-ins he moved his stamp operations to Nevada. Interestingly, his logo for the business was a wood-cut style design, with a man sitting under an apple tree, with the "Wayne's Philatelics" name written in a flowing ribbon curved around the tree. This particular logo is interesting because it was the original logo he designed for Apple Computer.

He holds a dozen patents but never had enough capital to make money off any of them.

Wayne is planning to publish a memoir titled, Adventures of an Apple Founder, to be initially available exclusively on the Apple iBookstore, then most major book sellers later in 2011.

Wayne has also written a socio-economic treatise titled "Insolence of Office", which he describes as

...the product of decades of research and observation into the evolution of human governance, and the foundations of the American Constitutional Republic. Through this analysis the reader is introduced to a complete, yet simplified understanding of the architecture of our Constitution, its foundations, principles, and the essential meaning of its structure all in the context of modern living.

"Insolence of Office" is also to be released in 2011

Steve Wozniak

In 1970, Wozniak became friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs worked for the summer at a company where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.According to Wozniak's autobiography, iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs's Volkswagen van), raised USD $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs's bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed, similar to SuperPong but with voice overs to the blips on the screen.

Excerpt from the Apple I design manual, including Wozniak's hand-drawn diagrams

By 1971, one year after enrolling, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and developed the computer that eventually made him famous. By himself he designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I.^[3] With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists very interested in computing, one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over several years. Unlike other Home Brew competitors, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that immediately created buzz and drew a crowd when it was unveiled.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. The Apple I was priced at $666. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500 plus a 1/3 markup, which is actually $666.67, rounding up to the nearest penny.) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first fifty system boards to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California.