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Engadget interviews Apple co-founder Ron Wayne
Ron Wayne is the man who missed out on the fortunes of Apple. He was one of the three co-founders of Apple, along with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Shortly after he signed the contract (which sold last week for almost $1.6 million) that founded the company, he sold his share for a mere pittance -- $2,300. Engadget's Brian Heater spent a couple of days talking with Wayne about his brush with history, and tells the story in prose, photos, and video. Heater notes in the intro to his post that the 77 year-old Wayne seems genuinely puzzled about why people find him to be fascinating. From his small pre-fab home in Pahrump, Nevada, Wayne now makes his living buying, selling and trading coins and stamps. He's also written a couple of books: Insolence of Office, which is a treatise on morale and economic collapse, and Adventures of an Apple Founder. Wayne was the designer of the original Apple logo, an ornate Victorian-looking drawing of Isaac Newton underneath the proverbial apple tree. That logo was quickly replaced by the now-classic Apple "byte" logo, erasing one of the few traces of Wayne's time as an owner of the company. Wayne still has a stack of drawings of Apple I case concepts he designed, as well as a photocopy of the contract that sold last week for millions. He sold the original contract to a collector in the early 1990s for about $500. Heater's interview is a rare look at the man who was so close to becoming a billionaire, but says he has "no regrets." Be sure to visit our sister site Engadget for the full interview, and enjoy the video clip below.
Two days in the desert with Apple's lost founder, Ron Wayne
"I have to ask you something," Ron Wayne begins, as we stand to leave his office, signaling the close of our day-long conversation. He takes a slightly dramatic pause, adding, "compared to other people, is my life really that interesting?" This isn't modesty; it's earnestness. Wayne is genuinely curious about what makes his 77 years on earth so fascinating to have warranted my traveling across the country in order to spend a few days in his presence. I answer, honestly, that it's his time with Apple that has made him such a figure of interest. "Oh," he responds. "So it's my brushes with famous people. I'm a footnote in someone else's story." Thirty-five years ago, Ronald G. Wayne helped co-found the Apple Computer Company with two men 20 years his junior, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak -- names that have since become synonymous with the personal computer revolution of the early 80s. For Wayne, however, it was a gig that lasted all of a dozen days, abruptly ending when he marched down to the Santa Clara County Registry Office to have himself stricken from the contract he'd authored. His is a name that pops up every few years or so, shrouded in mystery, the "forgotten" or "unknown" founder of one of the world's most successful companies – and perhaps more infamously, the man who once owned 10 percent of its stock, only to walk away from it all a mere $2,300 richer.%Gallery-141297%
