“The Rise and Fall of Adobe Flash: Before Flash Player Sunsets This December, We Talk Its Legacy With Those Who Built It”, 2020-07-07 ():
[Retrospective profile of Adobe Flash, with interviews from creator Jonathan Gay about its founding in 1992: it began as a vector drawing program for now-forgotten tablet / PDA devices, a project that was killed, and they pivoted to porting it to desktop. This too flopped, as customers suggested that cel-shading and rotoscoping animation would be more useful; with the Web emerging, they decided to retarget Java applets.]
[Their prototype ran at 2FPS, and Adobe was unimpressed. Microsoft & Disney, however, saw promise in it, and made it a highlight of their new websites like MSN and The Daily Blast, despite Flash being on the brink of death. Macromedia heard of it through them, and acquired Flash, as a bridge from their fading multimedia CD-ROM to the hot new Internet. The highly expanded Flash was the most interactive and versatile web development tool in an era when JavaScript barely existed, and easy to use.]
[Soon, games were being written in it (to the creators’ surprise, considering how weak a programming language it was, with barely-working conditionals or variables), and an online ecosystem springing up around sites like Newgrounds with literally millions of players. Flash soon became used for video, and animating.]
[Adobe, a decade after declining Flash, bought it for billions. But at its zenith in the mid-2000s, Flash was about to fall, as Adobe was distracted by corporate uses rather than video/games/general web, open web standards/browsers gradually accreted its capabilities natively; finally, a major blow was Steve Jobs declaring Flash dead—slow & power-hungry, proprietary (ie. ‘not Apple-owned’), insecure, and ill-designed for the mobile-first future. Flash entered a death spiral, and quickly was abandoned by even Adobe.]
[Its legacy is now primarily opening up creative Internet uses worldwide and getting countless people involved in media.]