When he arrives at that night's casino of choice, Wayne makes a beeline for the penny slot machines. If it's the middle of the month and he has just cashed his Social Security check, he will keep battling the one-armed bandits until 2 a.m. Wayne is waiting to hit the jackpot, and he is long overdue.

If Ron Wayne, now 76, weren't one of the most luckless men in the history of Silicon Valley, it wouldn't have turned out like this.

He was present at the birth of cool on April Fool's Day, 1976: Co-founder - along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak - of Apple Computer, Wayne designed the company's original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer and drafted the fledgling company's partnership agreement. That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it.

But he didn't.

Protecting his assets

Afraid that Jobs' wild spending and Woz's recurrent "flights of fancy" would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult-in-chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800.

In a place where risk and innovation are part of the accepted equation of change, he became Silicon Valley's ultimate what-if story.

"If he'd had the foresight and, more importantly, the fortitude to hang on for another six months, it would be a completely different situation for him," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst for Creative Strategies, who has covered Apple since 1981.

No second-guessing

Though Wayne remains an obscure figure whose story is rarely told - and then usually as a cautionary tale - he refuses to second-guess himself.

"I don't waste my time getting frustrated about things that didn't work out," he says. "I left Apple for reasons that seemed sound to me at the time. Why should I go back and 'what if' myself? If I did, I'd be in a rubber room by now."

Moments later, however, he turns somber.

"Unfortunately, my whole life has been a day late and a dollar short," Wayne says.

With the recent unveiling of the next-generation Apple iPhone, the company's other co-founders can expect to see their personal fortunes rise. Again. Since the release of the first iPhone two years ago, shares of Apple stock have more than doubled in value. Jobs' stake today is worth $1.5 billion. Wozniak's Apple holdings are not a matter of public record. Neither responded to interview requests.

Wayne was 42 and chief draftsman at Atari when he first encountered 21-year-old Steve Jobs, who was freelancing at the pioneering video game company after dropping out of college. Jobs had already met Wozniak, whose designs for a computer in a box he had seen at the Homebrew Computer Club, and now he was thinking about trying to sell them.

Role as sounding board

Wayne, who still lived with his mother, served as a frequent sounding board.

"He was talking about the possibility of coming up with a personal computer," Wayne says of Jobs. "There were all these other things he wanted to do, so should he waste his time being focused on that? I told him that whatever he wanted to do, he could do it more easily with money in his pocket."

But he cautioned Jobs never to forget that the money was just a vehicle for creating things.

"But he forgot," Wayne says now. "He probably won't like me for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business. He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money. What can somebody do with $200 million that they can't do with $100 million?"

The 'tiebreaker'

Jobs quickly figured out that his budding partnership with Wozniak would require adult supervision and asked Wayne to step in as the "tiebreaker." The two Steves came to Wayne's Milpitas, Calif., apartment, and after two hours of thrashing it out, the older man explained to Wozniak that the electronic architecture he was creating was critical to the ongoing existence of Apple.

"It was at that point he said, 'Let's form a company,' " Wayne recalls. Jobs came up with the idea of giving himself and Wozniak each 45 percent, the final 10 percent going to Wayne, who would mediate disputes between his headstrong partners.

"That would resolve any problems forever and ever," says Wayne, who drew up the contract on a typewriter. There was no such thing as a word processor yet. They were about to invent it.

After the agreement was signed by all three, Wayne took it to the county registrar's office.

Never owned an Apple

These days, Wayne sells stamps, rare coins and gold out of his home to supplement his monthly government check. When his precious metal clients drop by, he straps on a .38 caliber Police Special, in case one of them tries to rob him. He has never owned any Apple product, and when Wayne recently bought his first desktop, it was a Dell. It's been years since he last heard from Jobs.

Wayne insists he has no regrets about his choice then, though he's careful not to say he would do the same again.

"I'm as enamored with money as anybody else, and there are all sorts of things I'd love to do if I had it," he says.