WHY JOIN THE NAVY?

"Why join the Navy when you can be a pirate?"

I first heard that line watching Pirates of Silicon Valley, the 1999 TV movie with Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. It stuck with me the second I heard it. I couldn't have told you why back then. I just knew which side of that sentence I wanted to be on.

So let's actually figure out what it means. Because it's not really about pirates, and it's definitely not about the Navy.

Where it came from

The real version goes back to 1983. Jobs took the Macintosh team on a retreat while they were racing to finish the computer, and told them it was better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

The Navy was Apple itself, or at least the part of it working on the Lisa: bigger team, bigger budget, more rules. The Mac team was supposed to be the small crew on the fast ship. They took it so seriously that one of the programmers, Steve Capps, had a pirate flag made. Susan Kare, the designer behind the original Mac icons, drew it: a skull and crossbones with the Apple rainbow logo as the eye patch. It flew over their building for over a year. The Lisa team stole it at one point, which is honestly the most pirate thing in the whole story.

Who stole the mouse?

Here's the part everybody gets wrong, including me for years. Did Jobs steal the mouse from Xerox before Bill Gates did, or was it the other way around?

Answer: kind of both, and neither of them invented it.

The mouse came from Douglas Engelbart's lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the '60s. Xerox's research center in Palo Alto (Xerox PARC) built it into the Alto in 1973, along with windows, icons and a lot of what we'd now call a modern computer. Xerox never really turned it into a hit.

Jobs got a tour of PARC in 1979. It wasn't a break-in. Xerox got to invest in Apple before it went public, and Apple got to look around. Jobs walked out knowing exactly what he wanted to build, and Apple turned it into the Lisa and then the Mac in 1984.

Then Microsoft announced Windows. Jobs was furious and called Gates in to yell at him about stealing Apple's idea. Gates' answer is one of the best comebacks in tech history. Roughly: it's more like they both had a rich neighbor named Xerox, and when he broke in to steal the TV, he found out Jobs had already taken it.

Apple sued Microsoft over Windows in 1988 and lost. Xerox sued Apple in 1989, and that case got thrown out too.

So who's the pirate? Everybody. That's kind of the point.

Napster, Kazaa, BearShare and the burning-CD years

If you were young in 1999, you remember the first time you used Napster. Type in any song you could think of and there it was. For free. In a world where the only option was a $15-plus CD with two songs you actually wanted on it.

Napster launched in June 1999. It had something like 80 million registered users at its peak. Metallica sued it in 2000, the record labels sued it, and by July 2001 it was shut down.

And nothing stopped. Kazaa, LimeWire and BearShare picked up right where it left off. Everybody had a spindle of blank CDs, a burner and a stack of mixes with the track list written in Sharpie. Everybody also remembers downloading a song that turned out to be a totally different song, or something way worse than a song.

The labels spent years suing their own customers. Meanwhile the pirates had already proven what people actually wanted: any song, right now, without buying the whole album.

That's not a crime story. That's a product spec. Apple opened the iTunes Store in 2003 with 99-cent songs. Spotify launched in 2008. Today almost all of us pay a monthly subscription for every song ever recorded, on demand.

Streaming is just Napster that pays the artists. (Some would say "barely." That's a whole other post.)

The chip in the cable box

Even before Napster, the pirates were in the living room.

Back in the cable box days, people would order little chips out of the back pages of sketchy computer magazines and solder them onto the board inside their cable box, a Scientific Atlanta or whatever their cable company handed out, to unlock every channel. HBO, pay-per-view, the fights. All of it.

It was illegal, and the cable companies fought back hard. They could send what was literally called a "magic bullet" down the line, a signal that instantly killed the illegal boxes. Then everything went digital in the early 2000s, and that whole underground basically disappeared.

But look at what the people buying those chips actually wanted: every channel, whenever they wanted, without the cable company deciding what they could watch.

That's Netflix. That's every streaming service you pay for. Same idea as the chip on the motherboard, just legal and over Wi-Fi.

So what does it actually mean?

Here's what I take from it, after a lot of years on both ships.

I've been part of official groups. I've worked on teams with handbooks, managers and procedures for the procedures. The Navy is real, and it's not bad. It has resources, structure and people who know how to do things at scale. The pirates almost never win the lawsuit. Napster lost. The cable chip guys got the magic bullet. Apple lost its case against Microsoft.

But the pirates win the argument. Every time.

Pirates find what people actually want before the official version exists. Music on demand. Every channel. A computer you point at instead of type at. The Navy shows up later and builds the legal, polished, paid version of what the pirates proved people would line up for.

Pirates use whatever's around. A magazine ad and a soldering iron. A college dorm and a file-sharing program. A tour of somebody else's lab.

Pirates work in small crews. The Mac team was a few dozen people with a flag. Napster started with two guys.

Pirates don't wait for permission to solve the problem. That's the part that pulls people in. It's the part that pulls me in.

I've lived a little of this myself. I jailbroke iPhones for a lot of people back in the day, because people wanted to do things with their phones that the phone wasn't allowed to do yet. A lot of what we jailbroke for eventually showed up as official features. That's how it usually goes. The pirates show the Navy where the treasure is.

Steal the attitude, not the stuff

To be clear: I'm not telling you to steal cable, pirate software or download the new album off some site that's going to give your computer a virus. (I'll fix that computer. But I'll judge you a little.)

I'm telling you to take the pirate mindset into whatever you're building. Small crew. Fast ship. Solve the problem in front of you with whatever tools you've got, even if it's not how the official people would do it.

That's basically how Money Grinding runs. It's me, a computer, some AI that I vibe code with and a lot of figuring it out as I go. No big budget. No department to sign off. Just a crew that moves fast and helps people with the stuff the big companies are too slow or too expensive to handle.

The Navy has the bigger ship. The pirates always find the treasure first.

So, why join the Navy?

— g