Silicon Beach Software

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Silicon Beach Software was an influential early developer of software products for the Macintosh personal computer. It was founded in San Diego, California by Charlie Jackson. Jackson later co-founded FutureWave Software with Jonathan Gay, the company that produced the first version of what is now Adobe Flash.

Silicon Beach's best known 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.

Digital Darkroom was an early photo editor. It was gray-scale only, not color, but had a number of interface innovations, including the Magic Wand, which also appeared later in Photoshop.

Another innovative Silicon Beach product was SuperCard which, like SuperPaint, superseded the capabilities of an Apple-branded product (in this case, HyperCard).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 also produced a number of innovative computer games for the Macintosh. The most well known is Dark Castle released in 1986. Unlike many games of the era, outside of simple rocks, the hero is largely empty-handed in the battle against his foes. It was ported to several other operating systems by other companies.

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, CA area.[1]

Silicon Beach was acquired by Aldus in 1990, and in turn by Adobe Systems in 1994. Some former employees have reunited as Back to the Beach Software.


[edit] Other products

Software published by Silicon Beach

  • Airborne! (1985) combat game.
  • Banzai! (1985) teaser demo for Airborne!
  • Enchanted Scepters (1985) Point-and-click adventure game made with the engine that later became World Builder.
  • World Builder (1986) graphical adventure game authoring package.
  • Apache Strike (1987) 3D helicopter game.
  • Beyond Dark Castle (1988) Sequel to Dark Castle.
  • Super 3D (1988) 3D modeling application.
  • Silicon Press (1986) card and label printing software
  • Personal Press (1988) easy to use desktop publishing software, later renamed Adobe Home Publisher

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