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Excerpts from Ron Wayne interview - Ron was one of the 3 original owners of the Apple Company.
PG 117-118
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| Ron Wayne |
Bob- Did you leave before they started making the Apple-1?
Ron Wayne- I backed out of the situation twelve days after I drew up the contract. So I was never really involved in the workings of the whole Apple enterprise. I’ve been the ‘unknown founder” for decades.
I’ve had many vocations in my life, failing at each. I’ll put it to you this way. I’ve never been rich, but I’ve never been hungry either. And I’ve done a lot of fun stuff, and pursued many interesting things in my lifetime.
I’m absolutely convinced that I’ll go down as a footnote in history, literally because I happened to have known someone. Steve Jobs’ name will ring through the corridors of time. He’s had a very phenomenal, very productive, and very dominant life of activity in the computer world.
PG 120
It seems I made a very foolish mistake many years ago, roughly twenty years ago. I ran across an ad that somebody was running a guy who deals in famous autographs. And I’m thinking to myself, look…I’ve got this contract sitting in a filing cabinet collecting dust. Maybe I can turn this into some money, which at the time I could use. So I got in touch with the guy, and we negotiated, and that contract was sold to him for five hundred dollars. And you know what happened to that contract?
Bob- It sold at auction for one $1,500,000.
Ron- Now you got it. I’ve always been a day late and a dollar short.
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Excerpts From interview with Adam Schoolsky a friend of Wozniak in the very early days of Apple. Adam tells about the Zaltair Computer spoof he and Wozniak did at the First West Coast Computer Fair in 1977 - The Computer that never was. I was fortunate to purchase and Apple-1 computer from Adam in 1995.
PG 258-259
Bob- In terms of the fair, did they need some help maintaining the booth? How did you
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| Adam Schoolsky |
come about participating in that?
Adam- Steve and I had done those Zaltair brochures for that thing. I did help out in the booth. I think I was there mostly to check things out, and to distribute Zaltair brochures.
Bob- Was the Zaltair prank something you and Steve had planned out much in advance?
Adam- What we did was, I’d gone to his apartment a few weeks in advance, and we basically hashed the thing out. So that it would be untraceable. I went to a printing place in LA, and I had them typeset it and print it. They printed several huge boxes of them. We had them printed in four really bright colors. And I printed thousands of these. Then I went to another place, and I had them print envelopes, because we were going to mail them out. Steve paid for it, and I just shipped this stuff up to him on PSA. You know, you used to be able to air freight. I’d go to PSA and ship all of them, twenty dollars or whatever to ship all of them up there by air freight.
Bob- What was the thinking behind doing this? It was just a goof or something?
Adam- The Altair was the popular computer at the time. So what we did was to screw with them. The Apple ll was coming out, and it had capabilities that nothing else had. One of the things on the Zaltair flier was a chart – it was pretty funny – and it had these totally meaningless benchmarks. It had all of the current competitors of Altair; Apple, Processor Technology, and Sphere, and whoever else we put on there. And it had benchmarks features like speed, numbers that were totally meaningless. Of course, everything for the Zaltari was like, 1.0 or whatever, and then all the others are like 0.5. But they didn't relate to anything. Anyway, that was pretty funny. One of the ones we did, we just put ‘Apple.’ It didn't say ‘Apple-1’ or ‘Applell‘ it was just ‘Apple.’ And, of course, for Apple, which was the Apple-1, we just put really low numbers. Because we knew the Apple ll was coming out, which was going to be way better than the Apple-1.
Anyway, we’d take stacks of these things and dump them on the literature table. All these companies had tables, and they’d put literature out. So we’d put stacks of these brochures out, and go by, see that the stack was gone, and we’d go and put out another pile. There were like fifteen thousand of these things. They had one or two of them up- It was a riot!- in the MITs booth, on the wall, and they’d written on them in black magic marker ‘FRAUD!’ It was pretty funny. Yeah, it was good.
View Copy of original Zaltair Brochure "CLICK"
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Randy Wigginton was Apple employee #6 and worked at Apple for 9 years. I was specially interested in this interview because Randy mentions his brother built some cases for the Apple-1 computer and I have been trying to find out who built the case for my Apple-1 - I still do not know for sure.
PG 69
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| Randy Wigginton |
Bob- Your involvement with Apple from the beginning is one of those things that turned out to be a good happenstance, in your case.
Randy- Well think about it, I mean most everything is sort of happenstance. Really we don’t control much of our own fate.
Bob - How long did you work at Apple?
Randy- Basically up through 1985. For nine years or so.
Bob- Do you have good memories about the Apple-1 or the very early days?
Randy- Oh, God, there were so many. People always say they joined the company in the garage stage. Well, I joined in the couch stage. We weren't big enough for the garage yet. We were on the couch, you know. It eventually moved over to Jobs’ garage and building stuff there. My brother built some of the original cases for the Apple-1’s. Everything was very mom and pop. When the company became real, we rented office space.
Bob- The third founder, Ron Wayne, was there for a very short time. When you joined, was he already gone?
Randy- Well, I met him. But Apple was incorporated twice. They incorporated once in early ’76. Ron was never part of the second incorporation of Apple. He was still around, but he never really did that much. You know, I mean he drew some diagrams and wrote up some documentation, but that was kind of it.
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Read the book for 299 pages of 31 current interviews involving early Apple history.
