Wayne’s World

Apple’s original logo explains so much about who Ronald G. Wayne actually is

If you know Ronald G. Wayne for anything, it is most assuredly for this logo, the first-ever Apple logo:

It’s a very novel logo—Newton under an apple tree, an Apple about to fall on his head. It’s graceful, but it breaks every rule of modern logo design—it can’t shrink to a letterhead, and it requires a second to figure out what’s going on. But it’s clear the logo was aiming for something else.

“It was done in a Gothic design. It was not a modern logo by any stretch of the imagination,” Wayne said of the work, his most visible contribution to one of the largest companies in the world.

It reflected a sense of whimsy around the work the company was doing, something Wayne picked up from co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the logo also reflects Wayne’s roots as a design draftsman, a skill he picked up when studying at the High School of Art and Design in New York. Later in life, a couple years after departing the fledgling Apple, that skill led to a contract role at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

But while the federal R&D lab hired him as a design draftsman, it was his skill as a model developer that caught the attention of its management. “My manager walks over and says, ‘Mr. Wayne, we’ve been looking at your resume, and you say you’re a compulsive model builder,’” Wayne recalled. He responded affirmatively. “They said, ‘Well, you’re no longer a design draftsman; you’re going to establish the laboratory’s first model shop.’”

And in the late 1970s, as the Apple II was reshaping the computing landscape, he was working on scale models for the federal government—including of a mirror fusion reactor project that dominated Livermore during the period.

That’s only one element of Wayne’s highly diverse career, which has seen him become an inventor, an author, a philatelist, an expert on monetary systems, and most recently, the star of a television commercial. (Also, he helped organize Atari’s parts room, which is a bigger deal than it sounds—as that organization likely helped the company get itself in position for its eventual acquisition by Warner Communications in 1976.)

Yes, he knew Steve Jobs before he became Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before he became Woz. But he’s not just Apple.

In fact, he’s best described as a polymath. “The whole world was to me a sandbox with all the toys I could play with,” he told me in an interview. “I mean, I did so many different things because diversification was my hobby.”

Wayne, who never married, has instead put his energies into ambitious projects like a detailed model of the Nautilus, the submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He built the model in the early ’70s, and got to take a look at it again fairly recently.

The irony of Wayne’s life is that, despite being so uniquely talented, he never got a degree, which at times limited his upward mobility. For example, his time at Livermore ended partly because he didn’t have a degree; as the facility was tied to the University of Southern California, university rules barred him from joining the facility’s management.

“And that was the end of my experience at Lawrence Livermore,” he recalled. “Oh, but that was the most-fun job I had in my life.”

Yes, more fun than the job he had for two weeks at the company that was blowing up while he was building models.

Before Apple, he helped design important innovations in slot machines

Apple is a company that probably wouldn’t want to be associated with gambling today. But in 1976, the conversation that led to the company’s creation actually started with slot machines, because that was Wayne’s background. And his Atari co-worker Jobs, at least for a second, wanted in.

“He walked up to me one day and said, ‘I can get my paws on $50,000; let’s go into the slot machine business,’” Wayne said. “And I told him that would be the quickest way I could think of to lose $50,000.”

Jobs didn’t like that answer—but it likely led to the inevitable follow-up where he told Wayne about Woz. But there is a timeline where Ronald Wayne and Steve Jobs became slot-machine entrepreneurs, leaning on Wayne’s technical knowledge of the devices.

Because, see, Ronald G. Wayne was a natural fit to work at a company like Atari because, in the years before he joined the Pong-maker, he helped to develop some of the earliest electronic slot machines.

Wayne has said in the past that he was passionate about slot machines, not computers, which was part of the reason he ultimately exited the Apple partnership, and it’s clear from talking with him that he was not bluffing.

“I had a fascination with slot machines since childhood, when I was confronted with the first machine I ever got my paws on,” he recalled, noting that he heavily researched the machines before he designed them himself.

Many of them were mechanical in nature, reflecting their 19th century roots, and when Wayne finally got to try them out in Las Vegas in the 1950s, he saw the possibilities of bringing them beyond those roots.

“I saw all these mechanical slot machines all over everywhere, and I was then absolutely determined that there must be an easier way to do this,” Wayne recalled. That led him to work on a variety of designs, over a span of years. After much trial and error, he had something.

“I finally came up with a design that worked, and as a result, I wound up with the first certified gaming commission certified wholly electronic slot machine that wound up on the streets of Las Vegas,” Wayne said.

(Of his various patents, he has two from this era, during his time with Centaur Mini Computer Devices, including one slot machine.)

After that initial success, he worked on other machines, including an electronic craps table, which during that device’s qualification period for the Nevada State Gaming Control Board, created an unusual late-night moment at the Golden Nugget casino. But it’s one that might sound familiar to folks who know their Atari history.

“I got this call at 3 a.m. in the morning to go down to the casino and this guy had put in 240 quarters in that machine,” Wayne recalled. “And the next thing he did was to drop in one more quarter.”

That proved a problem, because all the bets were full on the machine, which meant he couldn’t actually keep playing. Wayne had to go out to the casino, manually override the block, and give the very drunk guy back his quarter.

“He finally threw the dice, hit a seven and got back I think 70 coins, and he passed out,” Wayne said. “Just the experiences we have in the gaming environment.”

Wayne said that despite his technical success, his own attempts to build a company around his slot machine designs ultimately proved fruitless. “I realized that I had no business being in business. I didn’t,” he said. “That’s one thing I lack, is any kind of decent business sense.”

He had more success contracting for others, but ultimately failed to set up a royalty structure for the devices he built. And when his company shut down, even though he legally could have walked away, he ended up paying his creditors back in full.

“I could have just walked away leaving all the debts behind because the corporation was responsible, not me,” Wayne recalled. “But that went against my grain; I just don’t function that way.”

It’s easy to see, in this light, why he was a bit gun-shy about reentering the slot machine business with Jobs … and, in the case of Apple, dealing with a potential liability risk as a founder. On the plus side, the experience led to one of his more fruitful personal projects: the Nautilus model.

“Somehow or other, I had to recover,” he said. “So I took on a recovery project, and that project was [the Nautilus].”

Some of Wayne’s more offbeat career paths: Selling stamps & pitching the gold standard

Stamp collecting is something Tedium has never actually covered, shockingly. But there may be no better way to introduce the concept of philately to the Tedium archive than highlighting how it became one of Wayne’s numerous interests.

It was a later-in-life hobby inspired by his brother Harmon, who was collecting stamps when he was a kid. What appealed to him was the imagery in the stamps:

What really fascinated me was this particular stamp I looked at when I was a very young kid. I look at the stamp and this is a photographic image of a president, I look closer at it and it’s made up of little tiny lines. Not a usual photograph, a whole series of little tiny lines that made this magnificent, camera-like image. I was fascinated by that.

The phenomenon he’s describing, called line-engraved intaglio, or “line engraving,” was an essential part of how stamps were made in the United States for more than a century, as well as many types of illustrations. These designs were painstakingly made by hand, and while this style can be made fairly easily in digital form today, stamp experts can easily tell the difference.

In the years after he left Apple, he opened a stamp shop called Wayne’s Philatelics, which he described as “moderately successful”—enough so that he was able to make it his full time job. And even after the store closed due to break-ins, he continued to collect and trade stamps. By 2016, he had more than a million stamps.

“And eventually I branched that out into coins, and I dealt stamps and coins through various stages for the next 40 years of my life,” he said.

The mention of coins points to another interest of his—monetary systems, a topic around which he has written multiple books. So, is he into crypto? No, much the opposite: Wayne feels that the monetary system has been on a path to disaster since it left the gold standard. It’s a belief, inspired by his reading of Adam Smith, that he’s stood behind for much of his life.

“I understood immediately, in 1968, that we were in trouble not only in The United States but worldwide because they took the whole world off of the gold standard,” he explained. “Which meant that every country in the world was running on what’s called fiat money. Instead of money backed by gold and silver, which had been the case for 2,400 years very successfully, now the world was running on Monopoly money.”

The fact that the system doesn’t have backing in the gold standard, he explained, means that there’s always pressure with governments who want to tweak the limits of what fiat money can do. In his view, the model always breaks down. “Every fiat currency in the world is turning to dust, and that will be complete within the next few years,” he added.

According to Wayne, this transference of value from traditional metals has already had an effect on the coin industry, where silver coinage has essentially disappeared from circulation in the 60 years since the Coinage Act of 1965. That law effectively led to coins being made of less-valuable materials, and to decades of hoarding by collectors.

“Where did it go? Into private hoards all over the country, including mine—because I knew what was coming,” Wayne said.

Wayne added that he shared his viewpoints with Jobs, who responded by buying $250,000 in gold, “but it didn’t sink in.” Jobs soon sold the gold for a modest profit.

“When it went up to $400,000, he sold it,” he recalled. “I mean, he learned absolutely nothing.”

Wayne talked about the financial system for roughly a fifth of our hour-long conversation. It’s clear that tinkering and collecting are where his passions lie, not Apple. He barely owns any Apple products, beyond an old iPad that he briefly flashed on the screen.

“It’s a facet of my life, and that facet has kind of drifted off into history,” he added.