Charlie Jackson

Jackson grew up in Imperial Beach, California. As a teenager, he also spent three years in Istanbul, Turkey, where he earned a B.E.P.C. degree from a French school. Jackson graduated from Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach in 1967, and was later inducted into the inaugural class of the Sweetwater Union High School District Hall of Fame in 2001. He earned a BA degree in Near Eastern Studies from UCLA in 1972, a master's degree in linguistics from San Diego State in 1978 and a C.Phil. in linguistics from UCSD in 1980.

Jackson was an active duty Marine Corps officer from 1972 to 1976 and Reserve officer from 1976 to 1989.

Startups

Jackson founded Silicon Beach Software in 1984. The company developed and published Macintosh software. It was best known for its graphics editors SuperPaint, Digital Darkroom and the multimedia authoring application SuperCard. Silicon Beach was acquired by Aldus Corporation in 1990. That year he was named Entrepreneur of the Year in San Diego for High Tech.[1]

In 1984, Jackson also founded the San Diego Macintosh User Group.

Jackson co-founded FutureWave Software with Jonathan Gay in 1993. FutureWave developed and published FutureSplash Animator. Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996 and renamed the product Flash 1.0, which in turn became Adobe Flash when Macromedia was acquired by Adobe Systems.

Since late 2009, Jackson has been a mentor for San Diego sessions of the Founder Institute.

In 2015, using the name Silicon Beach Software again, he founded a company to develop graphics software for Windows 10. The company's first product is SaviDraw.