Flash Back: An "oral" history of Flash

Summary

I don’t know what the first video game I ever played was. I would have been too young to remember. It very likely could have been a Flash game running in a web browser, patiently downloaded over a dialup connection. I got interested in computers at an early age, but it would take me a lot longer to really appreciate what a miracle and nightmare Flash was. Flash was a huge force that enabled many great applications but also loaded huge liabilities on millions of personal computers. Flash set our expectations of what the web could do, defined online culture, and enabled creative expressions online that HTML (et al.) couldn’t deliver. Yet it also had constant problems with security, performance, and accessibility, on top of installing a single corporate gatekeeper to the “full” web. It took hold on the web in only a few years after its creation, but would take about a decade to completely replace. I was a toddler when Flash was born. Now I’m a grownup and Flash has been dead for a few years. Everyone’s already left the funeral, so this is a good time for me to look back at what it was like to surf the web with Flash. Let’s look around the corpse and read the bones. “What is Flash? Why use Flash?” A screenshot of Macromedia’s pitch for Flash in August 2000. A hole in the web The World Wide Web was originally created in 1989 just for passing documents around. For that purpose, the earliest forms of HTML worked fine: basic formatting, hyperlinks, images. However, as the 90s went on, the web grew more and more into the mainstream. More and more participants in the web wanted more than just documents. In the 90s, the big buzzwords in technology were “Internet” (with always-uppercase “I”) and “multimedia”. Up until this point, multimedia on the web was just images, and if there was video or sound, web browsers would send you to your computer’s media player, like QuickTime or Windows Media Player. In terms of interactivity, there was pretty much just submitting forms and the ...