He created the first Apple logo. The madman, the third in conflict, the one who was always frowning on the keys. An adult in the children’s room. The two Steves, Steve Jbs and Steve Wozniak, were the be-all and end-all 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 this is Ronald Gerald Wayne.
Who is Ronald Wayne?
He was born on May 17, 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio. A graduate of the New York School of Industrial Art, Wayne’s real passion was slot machine design. He was obsessed with knowing the nature of money, the origin, uses and misuse of gold throughout our history.. Even today, in retirement, he feels his influence: He lives in Pahrump, Nevada, less than 50 kilometers from Las Vegas, the world capital gambling.
However, experimenting with slot machines led him to become self-taught and by 1950 he was working as an electromechanic and experimenting with vacuum tubes – it was a few more decades before transistors took over. His destiny would lead him to Atari. And there he met the two Steves.
Wayne, by his own account, was a grown man among promising youngsters. 21 years difference to Jobs, no less. When he came to the company, he drafted contracts and agreements, coordinated the legal part, the logistics, the most boring part. I can guarantee you one thing: his book “Adventures of an Apple Founder” is a real gem, the other side of the coin that every Apple fan should read.
But let’s focus: Some of 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 initial design of the Apple logo. A doré style engraving more typical of the 19th century than the 20th century. commercially, This logo was associated with Apple for only 9 months.
In the frame you can read Isaac Newton’s sentence “A spirit that always travels through the alien seas of thought … alone”. A quote from the romantic poet William Wordsworth and a kind of compliment to Wozniak’s great work: “I captured Wozniak’s flamboyance in this logo that I was commissioned to design.“.
Steve Jobs didn’t like it, however, and soon scrapped it, demanding something less intellectual, plainer and more direct, and most importantly, more modern. His last work was the most horizontal landscape design of an Apple II, which was never made. However, his concept left its mark: the first Macintosh and the Apple Lisa. They based their form on Wayne’s previous work.
Missed an opportunity or gained freedom?
“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 become the richest man from the graveyard. I was overshadowed by giants, I knew I would never get a project of my own and it wasn’t my passion anyway.” – Ronald Wayne to him Daily Telegraph
Those were his statements. No regret. He repeated it actively and passively. The origin of the question is given in the same title of this article: He received $800 for 10% of his shares, plus an additional $1,500 upon closing the deal. In total, $2,300 that could have turned into nearly $250,000 million today, Review of current business value. A staggering asset 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”. As an engineer, writer, poet, historian, illustrator and even economic consultant, he has more than ten patents. That’s the image Wayne wants to convey: that of a virtuous person and not dedicated to the same cause, to a single purpose.
He had a second chance. He missed it too
Now let’s go back to 1990. Wayne is cleaning and finds that he still has his first contract in a filing cabinet.”covered with dust and cobwebsSo he decides to sell it to a prospect for “a few thousand dollars,” according to CultofMac. A pair that became much more two decades later. Fast forward to 2011. The same contract was auctioned off at Sotheby’s: After ten minutes Battle, The winning bid paid $1.6 million.
As we can see, Wozniak was the initial signee and sort of CEO, primarily responsible for appliances, electrical engineering, electrical engineering and marketing jobs, and Wayne for engineering and documentation. And he was particularly good at it, but he was never satisfied. As he himself says, if he had continued at Apple, he “would have ended up in the documentation department, where he’s shuffling papers for the next 20 years,” he told Insider.
The reality of the facts is that barely two weeks after he started manufacturing the first hundred Apple devices, with a loan and little time, fear intimidated him and he decided to retire, fearing a possible failure would harm him owe to his eyebrows. . Was he lacking a little courage, a suicidal attitude?
Who knows. The ways of this industry are unfathomable. Or maybe you could have become one of those investors who accumulate stocks and capital to invest in other projects. But it’s clear that technology never fully motivated him. It was the race of other pilots. As a matter of fact, He doesn’t even have a smartphone: For emergencies, use a TracFone, a disposable item you can buy for a few dollars at any Wallmart.
Source : www.applesfera.com