He created the first Apple logo. The weird one, the third one in line, the one who always typed the keys with a frown. An adult in the children’s room. The two Steves, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were the alpha and omega of Apple, the entrepreneur and the inventor, the strategist and the 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 developing slot machines. He was obsessed with knowing the nature of money, its origin, the use and abuse of gold throughout our history. Even today, in retirement, he still feels its influence: he lives in Pahrump, Nevada, less than 50 kilometers from Las Vegas, the world capital of gambling.
Regardless, this experimentation with slot machines led him to become self-taught and from 1950 he worked as an electromechanical engineer, experimenting with vacuum tubes – it would be another twenty years before that transistors don’t take over everything. His destiny would lead him to Atari. And that’s where he met the two Steves.
Wayne was, in his own words, a grown man among promising young men. 21 years difference with Jobs, no less. So when he joined the company, he drafted contracts and agreements, he polished the legal part, the logistics, the boring part. There is one thing I can guarantee you: his book, “The Adventures of an Apple Founder,” is a true gem, the other side of the coin that every Apple fan should read.
But let’s focus: Wayne’s main achievements at Apple include several 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 traveling ever 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: “In this logo that I was commissioned to design, I captured the extravagance of Wozniak“.
Regardless, Steve Jobs didn’t like it and quickly abandoned it, calling for something less intellectual, more simplistic and direct and, above all, more modernist. His last job was the more horizontal landscaping of an Apple II that was never made. His concept, however, left traces: the first Macintosh and the Apple Lisa They based their form on Wayne’s earlier 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 at Apple, I would have ended up to be the richest man in “The Cemetery. I was in the shadow of giants, I knew I would never have my own project and anyway, it wasn’t my passion. ” —Ronald Wayne for him
Daily Telegram
These were his statements. He doesn’t regret it. He reiterated it actively and passively. The origin of the question is told by the same owner of this article: he received 800 dollars for 10% of his shares, in addition to an additional 1,500 dollars when the transaction was concluded. In all, 2,300 dollars which could have become 250 billion today, examining the current value of the company. A dizzying amount of 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, has more than ten patents to its credit. This is the image that Wayne wants to project: that of a virtuous person and not devoted to the same cause, to a single objective.
He had a second chance. He wasted it too
Now let’s travel to 1990. While cleaning up, Wayne notices that he still has his first contract in a binder, “covered in dust and cobwebs
As we see, Wozniak was the first signatory and a sort of general manager, mainly responsible for the teams’ electrical engineering, jobs for electrical engineering and marketing, and Wayne Mechanical Engineering and Documentation. And he was particularly good at it, but he never felt satisfied. As he tells it himself, if he had stayed at Apple, he would have found himself “in the documentation department handling papers for the next 20 years,” he admitted to Insider.
The reality is that just two weeks after embarking on manufacturing the first hundred Apple machines, with a loan and little time to lose, fear intimidated him and he decided to retire, fearing that ‘a possible failure does not put him into debt. to his eyebrows. . Did you lack a little courage, a suicidal attitude?
Who knows. The paths of this industry are impenetrable. Or maybe you could have been one of those investors who accumulate shares and capital to invest in other projects. But it is clear that technology has never stopped motivating him. It was the other drivers’ race. Actually, He doesn’t even have a smartphone: use a TracFone in an emergency, a disposable one you can buy at any Wallmart for a few dollars.
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