Silicon Beach Software

~ the last words ~

Silicon Beach sits in the part of computing history I can read about but cannot personally remember. It was founded the year the Macintosh shipped and sold before I turned six, on a platform that in Turkey in the eighties was a rumor rather than a product. Everything below is reconstruction.

There is one thread back, and it is stranger than anything I would have invented. Charlie Jackson, who started the company with his wife Hallie in San Diego in 1984, spent three years of his teens in Istanbul, took a B.E.P.C. from a French school there, and won the county youth championship in pole vault while he was at it. The man who would go on to seed-fund Wired magazine and put the money behind the first version of Flash learned high school French in a city I would be dialing out of thirty years later.

The company mattered because it was early and because it was good. When the Macintosh arrived there was almost nothing to run on it that Apple had not written, and Silicon Beach was the first outside developer to build a catalog on the thing that people actually bought. It started with games and moved into what the industry then called productivity software, which turned out to be where the money was.

~ the record ~

~ what they shipped ~

Dark Castle came out in 1986 and is the one people still name. It got ported off the Mac to nearly everything, and the sequel, Beyond Dark Castle in 1987, was the last game the company made because the other side of the business had become far more lucrative. A year earlier, Airborne! had been the first Macintosh game with digitized sound.

The productivity line was a pattern: take an Apple program and ship a better one. SuperPaint merged what MacPaint and MacDraw did separately, so you could work with bitmaps and objects in the same document, and it added enough of its own that it outlived both. SuperCard did the same trick to HyperCard, extending HyperTalk and adding the color and the multiple windows that HyperCard would not give you. Digital Darkroom was a photo editor in grayscale on machines that had no color at all, and it shipped a Magic Wand years before Photoshop had one.

~ the word plug-in ~

SuperPaint 2 and Digital Darkroom were the first Macintosh programs to let outside developers extend them with dropped-in modules, and Silicon Beach is credited with coining the term for those modules. Plug-in. It is now a word that people who have never touched a Mac use about their browser and their guitar amp, and it started as a feature description in a San Diego graphics package.

The company named its city as well. Silicon Beach as a phrase for San Diego, built on the Silicon Valley model, comes from this business. Los Angeles later borrowed it for its own tech district and now largely owns it, which is why siliconbeach.com today redirects to a university program in LA rather than to anything in San Diego.

~ the sale ~

Aldus announced its intention to buy in February 1990 and closed it for $25.5 million in stock. The logic on the Aldus side was reach: PageMaker sold to professionals, and Silicon Beach's catalog sold to people who had bought a Mac and wanted to draw something without learning a trade. Personal Press became Aldus Home Publisher, SuperPaint kept selling under the Aldus name, and Jackson was named San Diego's high tech Entrepreneur of the Year that same year.

Then the tide went out on all of it. Adobe bought Aldus in 1994 and had no interest in maintaining two of everything. SuperPaint and Digital Darkroom both stopped, and Photoshop kept the room. SuperCard went to other owners and is one of the few pieces of this catalog that is still, remarkably, being sold. Jackson had already moved on: he co-founded FutureWave with Jonathan Gay in 1993, which made FutureSplash Animator, which Macromedia bought in 1996 and renamed Flash.

~ the name came back ~

In 2015, Jackson registered the name again and started a new Silicon Beach Software, this time publishing graphics software for Windows 10. The first product was called SaviDraw. It is the same founder and the same company name, thirty-one years after the original and on the operating system the original spent its entire life defining itself against.

That revival is why this grave is for the 1984 company only. What died in February 1990 was the first outside software house the Macintosh ever had, at the moment it was worth more as a line item in somebody else's catalog than as itself. What is trading under the name now is a different thing wearing the same letters.

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