Silicon Beach Software

Last updated
Silicon Beach Software, Inc.
IndustrySoftware
Founded1984;40 years ago (1984) in San Diego, California
Founder Charlie Jackson and Hallie Jackson [1]
Defunct1990
FateAcquired by Aldus Corporation

Silicon Beach Software, Inc., was an early American developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California, in 1984 by Charlie Jackson and his wife Hallie. [1] Jackson later co-founded FutureWave Software with Jonathan Gay. FutureWave produced the first version of what is now Adobe Flash. [2] Although Silicon Beach Software began as a publisher of game software, it also published what was called "productivity software" at the time.

Contents

History

Silicon Beach's best known "productivity software" product was SuperPaint, a graphics program which combined features of Apple's MacDraw and MacPaint with several innovations of its own. SuperPaint2 and Digital Darkroom were the first programs on the Macintosh to offer a plug-in architecture, allowing outside software developers to extend both programs' capabilities. Silicon Beach coined the term "plug-in".

Silicon Beach was a pioneer in graphic tools for desktop publishing. Not only was SuperPaint a tool that had advanced graphic editing capabilities for its day, but Digital Darkroom was also a pioneering photo editor. It was grayscale only, not color (like the early Macintosh computers), but had a number of interface innovations, including the Magic Wand tool, which also appeared later in Photoshop. It also had a proprietary option for printing grayscale content on dot matrix printers. Digital Darkroom was used professionally to clean up scanned images for clip art libraries.

Another Silicon Beach product was SuperCard which, like SuperPaint, superseded the capabilities of an Apple-branded product (in this case, HyperCard). SuperCard used a superset of the HyperTalk programming language and addressed common complaints about HyperCard by adding native support for color, multiple windows, support for vector images, menus and other features.

Silicon Beach Software produced video games for the Macintosh. The most well known is Dark Castle released in 1986. It was ported to several other operating systems by other companies. Sequel Beyond Dark Castle was Silicon Beach's last game, because productivity software was much more lucrative. [3] Their 1985 release, Airborne!, was the first Macintosh game to feature digitized sound. [1]

Silicon Beach Software is credited with coining the term Silicon Beach to refer to San Diego in the same way that Silicon Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley and San Jose area. [4]

Silicon Beach was acquired by Aldus Corporation in 1990 and Aldus, in turn, by Adobe Systems in 1994. [5]

Other products

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<i>Beyond Dark Castle</i> 1987 computer game

Beyond Dark Castle is a computer game, released for Macintosh in 1987 by Silicon Beach Software. It was designed by Mark Stephen Pierce and programmed by Jonathan Gay. It is the sequel to Dark Castle, with more levels, monsters and items, as well as a larger game map and longer levels. A second sequel, Return to Dark Castle, was released in 2008.

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Digital Darkroom was an Apple Macintosh graphics program for editing gray-scale photos. It was published by Silicon Beach Software in 1987. It was programmed by Ed Bomke and Don Cone.

Jonathan Gay is an American computer programmer and software entrepreneur based in Northern California. Gay co-founded FutureWave Software in 1993. For a decade, he was the main programmer and visionary of Flash, an animation editor for web pages. He founded Software as Art, which was later renamed Greenbox, which made energy management solutions for the home.

Charlie Jackson is an American computer software entrepreneur who founded Silicon Beach Software in 1984 and co-founded FutureWave Software in 1993. FutureWave created the first version of what is now Adobe Flash. He was an early investor in Wired magazine, Outpost.com, Streamload and Angelic Pictures. Jackson is currently founder/CEO of Silicon Beach Software, which develops and publishes application software for Windows 10.

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Lavroff, Nicholas (April 1986). "Making Waves on Silicon Beach". Macworld . Vol. 3, no. 4. pp. 116–120.
  2. "Macromedia - Showcase : History of Flash". Archived from the original on 2006-01-14.
  3. Moss, Richard (2018-03-22). "The making of Dark Castle : An excerpt from The Secret History of Mac Gaming". Gamasutra. Retrieved 2018-03-25.
  4. "Siliconia - Part 1 A -- Silicon F". TechVenue. 1997. Archived from the original on 2006-02-23.
  5. Flynn, Laurie (1994-08-24). "BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; Aldus and Adobe Lay Claim to Digital Publishing (Published 1994)". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2021-03-04.