Apple’s Jolly Roger
A wallpaper celebrating the history and lore of Apple’s Jolly Roger.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" - Steve Jobs
It's the middle of the 1980s, and Steve had gathered the Mac team for a retreat as they worked furiously towards finishing the Macintosh, the all-in-one personal computer that would upend the industry. To motivate the team, Steve's maxim to the Macintosh crew was that "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy," a calling Andy Hertzfeld remembers as about "...being audacious and courageous, willing to take considerable risks for greater rewards."
The maxim struck a chord with developers. When the Mac team moved to a larger building later that year, Steve Capps, a programmer on the team, had a flag commissioned by famed icon designer Susan Kare, who drew a traditional Jolly Roger, but with a twist, the eyepatch was replaced with Apple's rainbow-coloured logo. The flag received Steve's blessing and was flown over the entrance to the building for over a year, save for a brief period when it was stolen by rivals working on the Lisa.
Since then, a pirate ethos of free-spiritedness, rebelliousness, and staying unrestrained & unmoored from conformity and bureaucracy has become a popular trope in the canon of Silicon Valley. And especially for those of the early 80s and 90s, being a Mac user was an inherently nonconformist position, with giants like IBM and Microsoft dominating the computing landscape. Sarah Todd, for Quartz, wrote: "To be a 'Mac person' was to opt out of mainstream consumer choices." Apple themselves leaned heavily into this narrative with the famous 1984 Superbowl ad announcing the Macintosh, and later in 1997 when they debuted their "Think Different" ad campaign. The scrappy, nonconformist, & rebellious underdog identity continues across the userbase, even as the tech giant has grown in size, organizational complexity, & scale.
This wallpaper is a nod to the Jolly Roger that flew over Bandley 3 in 1983, the building the Mac team worked in as they put the finishing touches on the Macintosh. Apple recently flew a recreation of the original 1983 flag in 2016, when it celebrated its 40th anniversary on April 1st, shortly before moving its HQ from Infinite Loop to Apple Park. And the flag is still available on Susan Kare's website and on merchandise in the Apple Store at Infinite Loop. Enjoy.
