Ronald Wayne



Ronald Gerald Wayne (born May 17, 1934) is a retired businessman who was one of the co-founders of the Apple Computer Company as a partnership with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Wayne is also noted for being the first person to leave the company.

Early life and education
Wayne was born in Cleveland, Ohio, United States on May 17, 1934. He trained as a technical draftsman at the School of Industrial Art in New York.

Career
In 1956, aged 22, he moved to California. In 1971, Wayne started his first business, a company selling slot machines. The company failed, with Wayne reflecting in 2014 that, "I discovered very quickly that I had no business being in business. I was far better working in engineering."

Apple Computer
In 1976, Wayne built the internal corporate documentation systems at the three-year-old Atari, where he met coworker Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak. To help settle one of their typical intense discussions about the design of computers and the future of the industry, Wayne invited the two to his home to facilitate and advise them. In the ensuing two-hour conversation about technology and business, Jobs proposed the founding of a computer company led by him and Wozniak. Those two would each hold a 45% stake so that Wayne could receive a 10% stake to act as a tie-breaker in their decisions. As the venture's self-described "adult in the room" at age 41, Wayne wrote a partnership agreement and the three founded the Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976. Wayne illustrated the first Apple logo, and wrote the Apple I manual.

After Apple
12 days after the founding of the company, Wayne signed away his 10% share in Apple Computer for US$800. A year later in 1977, Wayne received an additional $1500 to forfeit his claim in the newly incorporated Apple Computer, Inc. Wayne then resisted Jobs' attempts to get him to return to the company. Wayne's portion, even including dilution of shares, would have been worth billions of dollars today.

In the early 1990s, Wayne sold the original Apple partnership contract paper, signed in 1976 by Jobs, Wozniak, and himself, for $500. In 2011, that document was sold at auction for $1.6 million.

Wayne retired to a mobile home park in Pahrump, Nevada, where he sells stamps and rare coins, and plays penny slots at a casino. The first Apple product he ever owned was an iPad 2 that was given to him at a conference in 2011.