Apple’s Third Co-Founder Ronald G. Wayne on Atari, Invention, Integrity and the Story Beyond His 10 Percent Stake
…I’d start with imagination. That’s where it all begins. Then honesty, integrity, and sincerity. You have to have a feel for what you’re doing that is virtually a religion. If kids ask me what they should do for a profession, my answer is always the same: Find a profession you enjoy so much that you’d be willing to do it for nothing, and you’ll never work a day in your life. That is the philosophy I have followed.
My last job before my first retirement was with a company called Thor Electronics. I was the chief engineer. I was there seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. I was enjoying myself so much that it meant more to me than holidays. My boss once saw me at the drawing board and asked what I was doing there. I said, “What am I supposed to do? Sit around the apartment and listen to my arteries harden?”…
I had the pleasure of talking with Ronald G. Wayne. In the sprawling mythology of Silicon Valley, there are household names, and then there are the ghosts in the machine — the brilliant, eclectic tinkerers who laid the groundwork while the rest of the world was looking the other way. Wayne is one of those ghosts, though he is very much alive and entirely unapologetic about the wild trajectory of his life. He is the third co-founder of Apple Computer, a man who held the original tie-breaking ten percent of a company that would eventually reshape human communication. Yet, his story is far bigger than a dozen days spent mentoring two kids named Steve in the mid-1970s.
His journey started long before microchips became the gold rush of the twentieth century. Wayne was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934, right into the teeth of the Great Depression. When he was just two years old, his father left to start a new life, leaving his mother to navigate the lean years of the Depression and World War II. “She did a spectacular job,” he recalled, noting that from that point forward, life was mostly “fun and games.” Wayne was a natural tinkerer, fascinated by batteries, lightbulbs, and telegraph keys. After the war, surplus electronics flooded the market for pennies on the dollar. Armed with cheap vacuum tubes and a basic Navy training course he ordered from the government, Wayne essentially taught himself to be an electronics engineer. “I was having fun all the way,” he said. “Everything was fun to me at the time.”
That relentless curiosity turned him into a working polymath. For about ten years starting in the mid 1960’s, he bounced through various job shops, working as an engineer, draftsman, illustrator, and machinist. This massive skill set made him the ultimate utility player for any small company because he could do the work of 3 or 4 people. Eventually, he decided he was tired of being shopped around and he wanted a permanent position. So he employed a headhunter and that landed him immediately the next day an interview at a rapidly growing company in Silicon Valley named Atari. The interview with chief engineer Al Alcorn was strange and incredibly fast. During the interview Alcorn handed him a hypothetical circuit problem involving a lightbulb and two switches, promising him a job if he could draw the solution. “It took me about 45 seconds to draw the circuit,” Wayne remembered. “Once he successfully drew the circuit he remembers Alcorn saying, ‘Welcome to Atari!’”
Atari was a chaotic place, churning out Pong cabinets left and right but bleeding cash due to a completely broken purchased parts inventory system. Wayne fixed it in three months. “Within six months, they were making money hand over fist,” he noted. It was in this bustling environment that a young, intensely focused 19 year old named Steve Jobs walked in the door and latched onto the older, wiser engineer. Wayne decided to take him under his wing for the next 2 years.
In 1976 Jobs eventually approached Wayne with a problem. He and his friend Steve Wozniak wanted to start a company building personal computers, but Wozniak, an electronics genius, was very Parental and protective of his circuit designs and didn’t understand the concept of Proprietary/company ownership. On the evening of April 1, 1976, Jobs brought Wozniak, who he met for the first time that evening to Wayne’s apartment in Mountain View. It took Wayne roughly twenty-five minutes to explain the facts of business life to Wozniak. Thrilled, Jobs immediately declared, “That’s it! We’re gonna form a company!” and the Apple Computer Company Partnership was born. Under the terms dictated by Jobs, Jobs and Wozniak would each take forty-five percent, and Jobs gave Wayne ten percent to serve as the tiebreaker for any future arguments. Wayne sat at his typewriter and drafted the original partnership agreement right then and there.
Wayne’s time as an official Apple partner lasted only twelve days, but his fingerprints were left all over the company’s foundation. He drew the very first Apple logo — a nineteenth-century pen-and-ink drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, bordered by a quote from the poet Wordsworth. He created the Apple I Operations Manual and the professional circuit architecture schematics required for mass production of the Apple I. Later on, Jobs even hired him back as a contractor to design the physical geometry of the Apple II computer. Wayne created the concept of the completely integrated system, putting the keyboard and the computer board into a single, sleek unit rather than a messy tower of wires. His only regret was that his original design included a wooden rolltop door to cover the keys, a concept that mirrors the desk he used mentally as the model and a desk he uses to this day, a feature he believes Apple scrapped to save money on tooling.
Wayne ultimately walked away from Apple due to philosophical disputes. Although he voluntarily walked away he states emphatically that, I never sold or surrendered his interest in the partnership! He left because he doesn’t enjoy conflict and he was fully engaged in projects of his own. He lived life strictly on his own terms. “I was never married, so I was responsible only to myself and could take off in any direction I pleased,” he explained. For example, He invented a revolutionary, friction-free gauge and panel meter in 1971, only to learn the hard way that the corporate patent system is heavily stacked against the lone inventor. Following that, he started a company building electronic slot machines. When the business failed, he refused to hide behind a corporate shield, buying back from his friends, family and supporters every share of stock to ensure his creditors were paid in full. “I have to face myself in the mirror in the morning,” he said simply. “I couldn’t do it.”
His compulsive love for model building. Following his failure in the slot machine business he took a couple of years starting in 1972 to create a massive, highly detailed replica of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — Nautilus submarine- a mental recovery and therapy project he took on after the failure of his slot machine business which was an extension of his stint at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. At LLNL in the mid 1960’s He spent two thrilling years building intricate full scale models for a nuclear fusion reactor. The job only ended because the lab required permanent department heads to hold college degrees, and Wayne’s formal education had ended with his high school diploma.
Today, Wayne remains a fiercely independent thinker. He takes heavy daily doses of Vitamin C, a trick he learned from studying Linus Pauling, and he writes extensively on monetary economics. Convinced that paper money is destined to inflate into dust soon, he urges people to protect themselves by holding silver and gold. Through it all, his defining philosophy has never wavered. When young people ask him for career advice, his answer is always the same: “Find a profession you enjoy so much that you’d be willing to do it for nothing, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Yitzi: Mr. Wayne, it’s so delightful to meet you. Before we dive in deep I really would love to learn about your personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood, how you grew up, and the seeds for all the amazing work and accomplishments that have come since then?
Ronald G. Wayne: Well, I was born at a very early age in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934, right into the midst of the Depression. I published a book about 10 or 15 years ago called Adventures of an Apple Founder, and it tells the whole story of the beginning of my life. It was quite conventional, except that when I was two years old, my father decided to start another family in a different city and left my mother to raise my brother and myself through the Depression and war years. We managed quite nicely, and she did a spectacular job. From then on, it was fun and games as far as I was concerned.
I had a grand time. For example — if you wish me to continue — I had been a tinkerer in all sorts of things when I was a child from a very early age, particularly with batteries, lightbulbs, telegraph keys, and that sort of stuff. At the end of World War II, surplus stores began popping up like mushrooms everywhere. Among them were electronic materials left over from the war that were being sold dirt cheap. I could buy vacuum tubes, resistors, and capacitors; you name it, I could get it for pennies on the dollar. So, I sent off a letter to the U.S. Government Printing Office and got a copy of a Navy training course in basic electronics. This was in the late 1940s. I taught myself basic electronics in the age of vacuum tubes. Then, of course, when transistors came in, I taught myself transistor logic, and some years after that, integrated circuits. Essentially, I taught myself to be an electronics engineer. That was how it all began. I was having fun all the way; everything was fun to me at the time.
Yitzi: Amazing. Can you tell us what led you to Atari?
Ronald G. Wayne: What led me to Atari? Okay. I had begun my career spending 12 years doing “job shop” work. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term, but I worked for an employer who would hire me out to companies on a temporary basis. Those temporary jobs would last anywhere from months to, in one case, two years. On each of these jobs, I may have had different requirements, and over those 12 years, I became skilled in all facets of engineering. I was an engineer, a draftsman, an illustrator, and a machinist. I became what was called a polymath without realizing it. I was doing it for the fun of it — thinking, “That seems interesting, let’s play with this for a while.” What it actually did was make me a perfect employee for any small company. They could hire me, and there were three other people they didn’t have to hire because I could do their jobs. So, I did extremely well.
About 12 years into this, I decided maybe it was time to get a permanent job. I talked to a friend, and he said I just needed to get a headhunter to find me a position. I told him I didn’t think I wanted to pay someone to get me a job. He said, “Oh no, you don’t understand; you’re a professional, it’s the company that pays.” So, I found a headhunter, and the amazing thing was — and this was my first experience with this — the guy immediately set to work. The next morning, I found myself in the offices of Atari talking with Nolan Bushnell and his chief engineer, Al Alcorn. It was an absolute miracle. I was astonished myself that all this was happening.
Then I faced the strangest interview I ever had in my life with Al Alcorn. For about five minutes, he asked the usual questions. Then all of a sudden he said, “You have this lightbulb and these two switches. Show me the circuit that will make it possible for either of these switches to turn the lightbulb on or off.” I said, “You’re kidding.” He said, “No, you draw that circuit and you’ve got a job.” It took me about 45 seconds to draw the circuit. He said, “Welcome to Atari.” And that’s how that began.
The real interesting aspect of this was that Atari had been in business for about 18 months by that time, and they had employed 300 people to try and keep pace with the orders for Pong. They were doing the best they possibly could, spinning these machines out the door as fast as they could. But when I had my first project — to design a cabinet for a street machine — I needed a latch or something. I asked one of the kids there where their purchased parts manual was. They showed me a three-ring binder with page after page of five-digit numbers, after which someone had scribbled a crude description of a part. I said, “I can’t find anything (with) in this.” They said, “Well, go out to the stockroom, you’ll find your part, and the box has a number on it. That’s how you do it.”
I went out to the stockroom, looked around, and almost lost my breakfast. They had no system whatsoever. They had five numbers for the same part and five parts for the same number. I knew I was going to have a problem because I was going to have to talk to Al Alcorn and tell him what we had to do. I expected to get my head handed to me. I said, “Mr. Alcorn, you have no system whatsoever. You’ve got half a million dollars of inventory; it might just as well be in concrete. We’ve got to do something about this.” He said, “No, we don’t. You are the chief draftsman; you do something about it.” That’s when I really became upset. I couldn’t believe, after 20 years in the business, someone was telling the new kid on the block, “If you don’t like the system, change it.”
But that’s exactly what I did. I spent three months developing a purchased parts documentation system. Immediately, on my first project in 1974, I needed latches for a cabinet or some other part like that. I found out a couple of things. One, they were on credit hold. As successful as they were producing products, they weren’t making any money. Yet, once my system was put in place, they were making money hand over fist within six months. Within a few years, they sold the enterprise for $28 million. The people at Atari really appreciated what I was doing, and they made my life a gem for the next three years I worked for them.
It was during this time — about two months after I started — that Mr. Steve Jobs walked in the door. I don’t think he was 20 yet. I was, of course, nearly 40 years old. He found out something about my background and decided to latch onto me because he felt he could learn things from me. I decided I would mentor him. He later introduced me to his long-established friend, Steve Wozniak.
One day he came to me and did two things. He said, “I understand you are involved in slot machines.” In fact, I had produced the first wholly electronic slot machine to be qualified by the Nevada Gaming Commission. He said, “Look, I can get my hands on $50,000; let’s go into the slot machine business.” I told him that was the quickest way I could think of to lose $50,000. He just turned around and walked away, not impressed with that assessment at all.
Shortly after, he came back and said he and Mr. Wozniak were going to form a company to build personal computers. I thought that was exactly the right product at exactly the right time. I said, “That’s slick. So what’s the problem?” He said Mr. Wozniak was a very whimsical fellow and very parental about the circuits he designed. Woz was an electronics genius and had built a personal computer from scratch. He and Jobs had been in a club (The Homebrew Club) that was taking business computers and turning them into personal computers, and Woz decided he was tired of redesigning other people’s work and he wanted to design one of his own.
Jobs said he had a problem with the concept of proprietorship. He didn’t understand that if he designs a circuit, it belongs to the company they put together. Jobs thought I could persuade him. I said, “Okay, bring him over to the house; we’ll sit down and talk.” So on the evening of April 1st, 1976 my first interaction with Jobs and Woz came by. This was at my apartment located at 1900 California Street, #4 in Mountain View, California, on the first of April, 1976. It took me about 20 or 25 minutes to get Woz to understand the urgency of proprietorship — that his ideas had to become part of the company. At that moment, Jobs jumped up and said, “That’s it, we’re going to form a company!” He said he and Woz would have 45% each, and he turned to me and said, “You’re going to have 10% as a tiebreaker.” In the event they had disputes, I was to have 10%. It was at that moment that Apple came into existence. I immediately took them into my office, and they watched while I typed up three copies of a partnership agreement. Woz was stunned; he had never seen someone who wasn’t an attorney sit down and draw up a partnership agreement. That’s how Apple began.
Yitzi: That is an amazing story, and you’re an amazing storyteller, Mr. Wayne. Thank you. As you know, the three of you went on to change the world quite literally. Looking back, could you think of a few qualities about Mr. Wozniak, Mr. Jobs, and yourself that made the company so successful?
Ronald G. Wayne: It became successful because of Wozniak’s genius at the front end in putting the circuit together. He had been producing all sorts of products on an individual basis, tinkering everywhere. Jobs was a totally different person. Where Wozniak was extremely whimsical, Jobs was all business. He was focused entirely on, “How do we make money? How do we do this?” Those two made a perfect match; they were absolute foils for each other. I think that I succeeded in getting them started properly.
However — how to put this — I was with them for only 12 days. During that time, I designed the original Apple logo, the Newton logo, which has since become a worldwide icon. I designed the Apple 1 Operations Manual which included professional circuit architecture diagrams needed to create printed circuit boards needed for mass production of the Apple I. Much to my astonishment, I had caught some of Wozniak’s whimsy and did not design a 20th-century logo; I designed a 19th-century logo. It featured Newton under the apple tree with the apple ready to fall, and underneath was a phrase that said, “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone” — a line from Wordsworth, one of my favorite poets. I also did the operations manual for the Apple I and several other things to get them started.
We had some difficulties, as you would expect. I mentored them to whatever extent I could, but we had disputes of philosophy, and I eventually slipped away. I got out. But I do have to tell you, contrary to popular opinion, I never “sold” my 10% share of Apple in the way people think. In other words, for all practical purposes, I still own a 10% share of Apple. Although there is some dispute about it, I’m not wishing to discuss that at the present time.
They went on and did their thing, formed a corporation, and received an enormous amount of funding. During that time, Jobs came back to me and said, “We’re going to do the Apple II and we need a new enclosure. Would you design it?” I said yes. I sat down and designed the enclosure for the Apple II. I didn’t know they had funding; as far as I was concerned, these were two kids who didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I designed the thing based on fabricated parts so no expensive tooling was necessary. It was a simple design — a wooden and metal enclosure — but the geometry was unique to the world of electronics and personal computers.
When personal computers first began to come out, they were all towers with separate keyboards, monitors, and wires hanging everywhere. The apple I had no case. My design for the Apple II was an integral system. The board was built horizontally with an integrated keyboard and designed to have a monitor on top. That integrated system was what they actually put together. However, when I saw the final Apple II, it was made out of a plastic enclosure. It followed my geometry, but they had spent $50,000 on a mold to produce the cabinets. I had no idea they had that much money, or I would have designed the physical build differently, though the geometry would have been the same. That geometry went on to be the foundation for all the computers they built thereafter, including the Macintosh, the iPad and all the other horizontal layouts they have produced ever since.
The only thing I regret is that my original design included a tambour door — like a rolltop desk — that came down over the keyboard. When you pulled it down, the computer turned off; when you lifted it, it turned on. That feature was never included. I imagine it may take another 50 years before someone realizes the importance of that rolltop. I was a little disappointed by that, but the Apple II was one of my major contributions.
Yitzi: Amazing. Apple products are known for their distinct design. Do you feel your design aesthetic was influential in Apple’s trajectory?
Ronald G. Wayne: My contribution to that was the geometry. No other computers had that geometry at the time, and many today still don’t. It’s integral; it gets rid of wires and results in a single box you plug into the wall, and you have a computer.
Yitzi: You’ve had an illustrious career since then. Can you share some other stories that stand out from your post-Apple career?
Ronald G. Wayne: I have been a serious inventor for a long time and hold more than a dozen patents. Anything that appealed to my curiosity, I pursued. I was never married, so I was responsible only to myself and could take off in any direction I pleased.
One thing I did in 1971 involved DC meters. Everyone is familiar with standard pointer-type meters created by D’Arsonval in the 1880s. The problem with the D’Arsonval meter is that the pointer is on a bearing, and all bearings have friction. The pointer never actually points perfectly to the value you are measuring because of that friction. Technically, this is referred to as hunt, lag, and hysteresis. In 1971, I came up with a new type of panel meter with no hunt, no lag, and no hysteresis. You hooked it up, and the pointer went instantly to the projected image of a value. That was the first significant patent I received.
Over time, I realized that the patent game belongs to the corporate world. A private inventor today has one foot in the hole and the other on a banana peel because the system is stacked against him. The United States is one of the few places where it is not a criminal offense to infringe on a patent. Corporations have the power to play games in court, and the private inventor is often helpless. I got “nailed” by that with my meter, which I felt was going to make my fortune, but I never had a chance to produce it. I eventually gave up.
I also formed a company that built the first electronic slot machine qualified by the Nevada State Gaming Control Board. I discovered relatively early on that I really had no business being in business. The enterprise came unglued. I shocked people because, when the business failed, the first thing I did was make sure every creditor, most of whom were close family and friends, was paid 100 cents on the dollar. I bought back every share of stock, mostly from family and friends. Everyone asked why I was doing that, since a corporate shell is supposed to protect you. I said, “Look, I have to face myself in the mirror in the morning. I couldn’t do it.”
It hit me very hard, and I needed some rehabilitation from that event. My rehabilitation was model building. I am a compulsive model builder. I built a seven-foot-long model of Jules Verne’s Nautilus as pictured in the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was detailed to the nth degree with lights and everything. If you took off the conning tower, you could look down into the lighted chart room.
That capacity for model building got me a job at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. In big science enterprises — whether building ships, aircraft, or reactors — you do not start building a product until you’ve built a model. Until I got there, they had been using outside shops. Someone saw my resume and realized I was a compulsive model builder. On my first day as a design draftsman, they said, “Mr. Wayne, you’re no longer a design draftsman; you’re going to build our model shop.”
They set me up with facilities, and I began building models for the Mirror Fusion Reactor project. The actual machine they were building was a cylindrical metal enclosure 65 feet long and 50 feet in diameter. It was intended to get energy by fusion rather than fission. Fission is where you take a large atom, like uranium, and break it down; fusion is where you take small atoms and squeeze them together. I had a ball doing that for two years until they told me their policy was never to employ a “job shopper” for more than two years. They wanted me to stay as a permanent employee. I said that was a good idea, but they asked where I got my degree. I’m not degreed; my high school diploma was the end of my formal education. Because they were linked to the University of Southern California, you couldn’t run a department without a degree. That was the end of my employment there, but it was the most fun job I ever had.
Yitzi: Can you share some lesser-known stories of your interaction with Woz or Steve Jobs?
Ronald G. Wayne: As I indicated, the relationship was short — about two weeks. There wasn’t much beyond my specific tasks like the logo and the manual. However, one thing did astonish me. I regarded these kids as technologically qualified, yet I discovered Steve Jobs didn’t know that aluminum was an electrical conductor. But then it sunk in: he was not the electronics guy. That was Wozniak.
Yitzi: Was there anything that gave you an inkling that this could be one of the biggest companies in the world?
Ronald G. Wayne: I don’t think anybody could have imagined it would turn into a monumental empire. When they incorporated, they acquired the funding to grow. I knew from the beginning that the personal computer was the perfect product at the right time, and I had no doubt it would be successful, but nobody could have guessed the scale of it today.
Yitzi: Looking back to when you first started, can you share five things needed to be successful in the technology sphere?
Ronald G. Wayne: I’d start with imagination. That’s where it all begins. Then honesty, integrity, and sincerity. You have to have a feel for what you’re doing that is virtually a religion. If kids ask me what they should do for a profession, my answer is always the same: Find a profession you enjoy so much that you’d be willing to do it for nothing, and you’ll never work a day in your life. That is the philosophy I have followed.
My last job before my first retirement was with a company called Thor Electronics. I was the chief engineer. I was there seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. I was enjoying myself so much that it meant more to me than holidays. My boss once saw me at the drawing board and asked what I was doing there. I said, “What am I supposed to do? Sit around the apartment and listen to my arteries harden?”
Yitzi: You’ve been blessed with a long, productive life. Can you share some of the health routines that help your body, mind, and heart thrive?
Ronald G. Wayne: The strongest health issue I latched onto was a result of Linus Pauling, who was enamored with Vitamin C. About six years ago, I decided to try his approach. Before that, I used to get colds that would last for weeks. I started taking heavy doses of Vitamin C — specifically time-release, because the body eliminates it quickly. I take about five grams a day: two in the morning, one at lunch, and two in the evening. Since then, I have not had a cold that lasted more than three days.
I also want to contribute to public knowledge regarding monetary economics. When I was 19, I read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It was fascinating and significant for my understanding of how money functions. In 1968, they repudiated silver certificates and refused to redeem them in silver. By 1970, no country was striking silver coins because of the Bretton Woods conference, which took the world off the gold standard. This meant every currency became “fiat” — paper money with no backing.
Once that happened, I knew we were in trouble. 1964 was the last year the U.S. struck silver coins. In 1965, they began flooding the country with copper-nickel “slugs.” This led to Gresham’s Law: “bad money drives out good money.” If you have a silver quarter and a copper-nickel quarter, you spend the slug and keep the silver.
By 2010, I published Insolence of Office. I consider this work to be my opus magnum. I encouraged people to defend themselves by acquiring as much silver coin as possible. Eventually, all the world’s paper money will turn to dust because it will inflate itself out of existence. Inflation isn’t the price of things going up; it’s the buying power of your money going down. My encouragement to the public is to buy as much silver or gold coin as you can squirrel away. It’s the best savings account you can have to prepare for nasty times.
Yitzi: If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be?
Ronald G. Wayne: I would say put your political leadership in the hands of people who are concerned with the general public and the Constitution of the United States. If you do that, you’ll survive.
Yitzi: How can our readers follow your work and purchase your books?
Ronald G. Wayne: Find whatever you can of the writings I’ve put out there: Insolence of Office, Adventures of an Apple Founder, Counterfeit Trust, and my most recent book, Tomorrow’s Money. Those will help you manage your affairs in the difficult times to come.
Yitzi: Mr. Wayne, thank you so much for your time. I wish you continued success and good health.
Ronald G. Wayne: You cannot know how grateful I am for this opportunity. It’s a true pleasure and my honor. Thank you, sir. Have a very nice weekend, my friend.
Apple’s Third Co-Founder Ronald G Wayne on Atari, Invention, Integrity and the Story Beyond His 10 was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.