He created the first Apple logo. The weirdo, the third in discord, the one who always hit the keys with a frown. An adult in the children’s room. The two Steves, Steve Jbs and Steve Wozniak, were Apple’s alpha and omega, entrepreneur and inventor, strategist and creative. But besides the great Bill Fernandez, there was another man who gave shape and meaning to the first Apple. and it’s Ronald Gerald Wayne.
Who is Ronald Wayne
He was born in Cleveland, Ohio on May 17, 1934. A graduate of the New York School of Industrial Art, Wayne’s true passion was the development of slot machines. He was obsessed with knowing the nature of silver, the origin, use and abuse of gold throughout our history.. Even today, in retirement, he still feels the influence: he lives in Pahrump, Nevada, less than 50 kilometers from Las Vegas, the world capital of game.
In fact, this experimentation with slot machines led him to train as an autodidact and from 1950 he worked as an electromechanical engineer, experimenting with vacuum tubes – there were still a few decades before transistors took hold. all in charge. His destiny would lead him to Atari. And that’s where he met the two Steves.
Wayne was, by his own admission, a grown man among promising youngsters. 21 years of difference with Jobs, nothing less. So when he joined the company, he drafted contracts and agreements, tweaked the legal part, the logistics, the most boring part. There is one thing I can guarantee you: his book, ‘Adventures of an Apple Founder’, is a real gem, the flip side of the coin that every Apple fan should read.
But let’s focus: Wayne’s major accomplishments at Apple include various strategic ideas, his editorial work – he wrote the instruction manuals for the Apple I – and, of course, the first design of the Apple logo. A Doré style engraving more typical of the 19th century than the 20th. commercially, this logo was only associated with Apple for 9 months.
In the frame you can read Isaac Newton’s phrase “A mind always traveling through the strange seas of thought…alone”. A quote from the romantic poet William Wordsworth and a sort of compliment to Wozniak’s great work: “I captured Wozniak’s extravagance in this logo I was commissioned to design.“.
However, Steve Jobs didn’t like it and quickly abandoned it, asking for something less intellectual, more simplistic and straightforward, and, above all, more modernist. His last work was the most horizontal landscape design of an Apple II that was ever made. His concept, however, left traces: the first Macintosh and the Apple Lisa. they based their form on Wayne’s previous work.
Opportunity lost or freedom gained?
“Everyone wants to be rich, but I couldn’t keep up. I was 40 and they were 20, it was like grabbing a tiger by the tail. If I had stayed with Apple, I would have finished there. ‘richest man.” from the cemetery. I was in the shadow of the giants, I knew I would never have my own project and it wasn’t my passion anyway.” — Ronald Wayne for him Daily Telegraph
These were his statements. No regrets. He reiterated it actively and passively. The origin of the question is related by the same title of this article: he received $800 for 10% of his shares, plus an additional $1,500 upon signing the agreement. In all, 2,300 dollars which today could have become nearly 250,000 million, reviewing the current value of the company. A vertiginous capital that would have made him someone disgusting rich. And that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid.
On his own website, he describes himself as a “Renaissance man”. Engineer, writer, poet, historian, illustrator and even economic consultant, he has more than ten patents to his credit. This is the image that Wayne wants to project: that of a person who is virtuous and not dedicated to the same cause, to a single goal.
He had a second chance. He missed it too
Now let’s go back to 1990. While cleaning up, Wayne finds he still has his first contract in a filing cabinet, “covered in dust and cobwebs“. So he decides to sell it to someone interested, according to CultofMac, for “a few thousand dollars”. A couple who two decades later have become much more. Let’s travel to 2011. This same contract was sold at auction at Sotheby’s: after ten minutes of combat, the winning bid paid $1.6 million.
As can be seen, Wozniak was the first signatory and a kind of CEO, mainly responsible for equipment electrical engineering, electrical engineering and marketing jobs, and Wayne of Mechanical Engineering and Documentation. And he was particularly good at it, but he was never satisfied. As he says himself, if he had continued at Apple, he would have found himself “in the documentation department shuffling papers for the next 20 years”, he confessed to Insider.
The reality of the facts is that barely two weeks after embarking on the manufacture of the first hundred Apple machines, with a loan and little time to spare, fear intimidates him and he decides to retire, fearing that a possible breakdown does not indebt it. up to his eyebrows. . Did he lack a bit of courage, a suicidal attitude?
Who knows. The ways of this industry are impenetrable. Or maybe you could have become one of those investors who accumulate shares and capital to invest in other projects. But it is clear that technology has never finished motivating him. It was the race of the other pilots. Actually, He doesn’t even have a smartphone: use a TracFone for emergencies, a disposable one you can pick up at any Wallmart for a few bucks.
