Technology History | 20525 Mariani Avenue — The Third Signature Lasted Eleven Days

Apple's founding document gave Ronald Wayne ten per cent, and he kept it for eleven days. He had typed the agreement himself, three pages of careful legal phrasing, and signed it alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak on 1 April 1976 in his own apartment in Mountain View. The split was 45 per cent to Jobs, 45 to Wozniak, and ten to Wayne, who at 41 was the older head in the room and the intended tie-breaker. He was also the only one of the three with assets worth losing. A general partnership makes every partner liable for the whole debt, and Jobs was about to borrow against an order from a shop with a patchy payment record. On 12 April an amendment removed him. He took $800 then and $1,500 later to give up any future claim. The company Wayne left was not yet a company in the legal sense — Apple Computer incorporated on 3 January 1977, a date often collapsed into the April founding. None of this happened in a garage, whatever the retellings say. Wozniak told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 that "the garage is a bit of a myth", adding that no design, prototyping or manufacturing took place there and that most of his work was done at his desk at Hewlett-Packard. That garage is on Crist Drive in Los Altos and remains a private home, which is why this pin sits on a working address instead. Mariani One went up in 1981 and carried Apple's corporate address through the Apple II years, the Macintosh launch and the near-death of the mid-1990s. Jobs moved the headquarters next door to Infinite Loop after his return in 1997, and Apple still occupies this building. The founding papers themselves have outlived every office. Wayne's copy went to Sotheby's in 2011, and the partnership agreement with his withdrawal came back to auction at Christie's in New York on 23 January 2026. The cover photograph shows the Apple Campus sign at One Infinite Loop, a few hundred metres east of this pin, where the headquarters moved in 1997. Photo: Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.