Daniel Hruska One of the most important symbols of the early 80s related to Apple is up for sale. This is a nicknamed flag Pirates of Silicon Valley (English Pirates of Silicon Valley), which gave its title to the 1999 film of the same name. At the time, Apple had moved to its current campus and the entire personal computer segment was in its infancy.
Two teams separated by a single street were competing to build the best personal computer - the Macintosh or the Lisa. Steve Capps from the Macintosh team came up with the idea to create a custom team flag. So he sewed it himself from black canvas and asked someone from the design department to draw a skull and bones on it.
That someone was Susan Kare, the author of the icons used in the first Mac, as well as the Chicago font. “Mac and Lisa's teams were right across the street and their rivalry was huge. It was a different time. If the situation had turned out differently, Lisa could have been as important as Mac," explains Kare. But as we know, Lisa was a fiasco and Mac got all the glory.
However, let's get back to the flag. Once it was finished, someone from the Macintosh team attached it so that the Lisa team could see it on a daily basis. The tension between the teams was considerable, so it is not surprising that someone tore down the flag afterwards, most likely the Lisa team. Even during that time, the flag managed to become a symbol that inherently belongs to some period photographs.
Unfortunately, the original was not preserved, so Susan Kare had to remember and outline it from old photographs. The graphic artist herself admits that the new version will not be a 100% copy of the original, but she used the same color and perhaps even brushes. She even drew it like thirty years ago on the kitchen table to get as close to the past as possible.
But why did Kare revive the flag in the first place? One of the current employees emailed her to ask if she would make one for him. It read, "I didn't come here to join the Navy." One of Steve Jobs' famous sayings is: "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy." When asked if Kare thinks a similar spirit prevails in the whole society, she could not answer.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is now available for purchase at Site Suzanne Kare in two variants (both of course handmade directly by Kare). The smaller version measuring 100 x 150 cm costs $1900 (CZK 42), the larger version measures 000 x 120 cm and costs $180 (CZK 2500). The delivery time is 55-000 weeks, so if you want to make a famous Apple fan happy on Christmas Day, you might still be able to do it. Postage to the Czech Republic costs approximately 3 crowns.
Well, not really for that price :-D