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In the original The Wizard of Oz (1939), the film goes from black and white to color as Dorothy is transported from Kansas to the Land of Oz.
Something similar happened with the Internet in the mid-1990s.
The internet was once a land of blocks of text and sad backgrounds. But according to How to geekEverything changed in 1996 when a company called Macromedia acquired an animation tool called FutureSplash and renamed it Macromedia Flash 1.0.
This led to a creative explosion over the next decade.
As Flash spread across the Internet as a browser plug-in, designers entered the fray.
Browser games, interactive websites, web comics, and other colorful content took over the internet.
In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia for $ 3.4 billion and set out to make it even more ubiquitous.
Flash laid the foundation for today’s world of video streaming
With a file format called FLV, any browser that had Flash Player installed could play video.
As How to geek reminds us that, even now, massive sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu were once completely reliant on Flash.
The beginning of the end
The downfall of Flash began in 2007, when Apple decided not to support it on the new iPhone. In 2010, Steve Jobs wrote the famous open letter “Thoughts on Flash,” which featured a savage critique of the technology:
- Fast power consumption
- Poor performance on mobile devices
- Reliance on one company (Adobe) security made it a big risk
Flash was simply not created for the growing world of mobile devices. And soon, new web standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) became the norm.
In 2017, Adobe announced that it would discontinue Flash. Support officially ended on December 31, 2020.
There will be no return to Kansas for this pioneering Internet technology. But if you’re feeling nostalgic, projects like BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint and Ruffle have diligently preserved Flash’s rich history.
