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.Wayne traces such interest back to 1994's The Mac Bathroom Reader, a curious little book of Apple trivia with a cover featuring a rubber ducky and a roll of toilet paper. The book's author, Owen Linzmayer, happily cast Wayne as the "forgotten founder," borrowing that phrase for the first chapter of 1999's Apple Confidential....
On his desk is a low-level Dell desktop with a bundled flat screen monitor purchased about a year and a half ago. Much to Wayne's chagrin, the system was running Vista, rather than the Windows XP to which he was far more accustomed. "I didn't know if all my programs and files would work on Vista," Wayne explains, with a hint of exasperation. I've got an accumulation of 20 years of this stuff and I don't want to lose it all simply because of this wonderful new technology for which I have absolutely no use of anyway."Wayne, somewhat famously, never owned an Apple product until quite recently, when an interviewer gifted him an iPad, and while he was taken with the tablet, it eventually found its way into the hands of Wayne's adopted son, who now claims full ownership of the thing.