One of the most definitive and defiant pieces of counterculture art to ever come out of Silicon Valley is now available for purchase. Susan Kare—the designer behind all of the Mac’s beloved early iconography, as well as its prominent typefaces like Chicago—has recreated the Pirates of Silicon Valley flag, which was used to inspire the original Macintosh team as they worked to create the first graphical user interface-driven personal computer in history.

Even if you’ve never seen the flag before, you’re probably familiar with the term Pirates of Silicon Valley (if only because it’s also the title of the Noah Wyle and Anthony Michael Hall biopic about the early days of Apple and Microsoft). The story of how Steve Jobs and his team of Macintosh engineers became known as the Pirates of Silicon Valley is legendary. At an offsite meeting with the original Macintosh team, Jobs set up his pad, laying out three maxims for the team to live by: “Real artists ship. Better to be a pirate than join the Navy. Mac in a book by 1986.”

A few months ago, I got an email from an Apple employee who identified with that flag, and asked if I could make him a new version to hang in his cubicle.

The Macintosh, of course, shipped in 1984; the first “Mac in book,” on the other hand, missed Jobs’s ship date by a full three years. But the “Pirates” comment caught on immediately. To the assembled engineers and designers, it allowed them to romanticize 80-hour work weeks and frustrating development schedules in the context of being renegades against the establishment.

So Steve Capps, a programmer working on the Macintosh team who was also an amateur tailor, sewed the team a black flag, and asked Susan Kare to paint it. Then, in the middle of the night, they snuck into Apple’s headquarters and hung it from the Macintosh building to egg on the Lisa team across the street, which, at the time, was designing a next-gen Apple computer that was the very antithesis of the Mac.





“The Mac and Lisa teams were right across the street, so they had a rivalry with each other,” Kare tells me. “It was a different time. If history had gone another way, the Lisa might have been as influential as the Mac.” But the Lisa wasn’t as influential as the Mac. In fact, when it was released, it was a dud, and even during development, tension between the Mac and Lisa teams was extremely high. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that the Lisa team stole the original pirate flag. To this day, no one knows where it went; it survives only as a background element in vintage photos.

Asked why she decided to recreate the flag over 30 years later, Kare says that it was at the request of a new Apple employee. “A few months ago, I got an email from within Apple from someone who really identified with that flag, and asked if I could make him a new version to hang in his cubicle,” Kare tells me. “In his email, he told me, ‘I didn’t come to Apple to join the damn Navy.’ So he wanted the flag to remind him of why he came to the company in the first place.”