Over the next decade, the Flash software became ubiquitous on the Internet, eventually drawing the attention of Adobe, which acquired Macromedia in 2005 for $3.4bn USD, a move that saw the entire Macromedia product line including Flash, Dreamweaver, Director/Shockwave, Fireworks and Authorware absorbed into the Adobe product stable.

Among the companies that experimented with FutureSplash were Microsoft and Disney.įutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia in November 1996, and Macromedia then set about rebranding it, contracting the name FutureSplash to Flash, and releasing their rebranded version the next month. Companies were looking for ways to make their websites more interactive and visually appealing, and they increasingly opted to use FutureSplash. In 1995, FutureWave tweaked SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and released this new product as FutureSplash Animator on the PC and Macintosh. When the PenPoint operating system failed to take off, SmartSketch was ported to Windows and Mac OS. SmartSketch was a drawing program for the PenPaint operating system (an OS designed for pen computers). The origins of Flash date back to the 1990s, when it started life as SmartSketch, an application that was published by FutureWave Software. Developers didn't have to worry about the technical details of cross-platform support, and people who wouldn't have written code otherwise could gradually make their animations into games. It was lightweight, and, with a browser plugin, could run on multiple operating systems.įlash had a designer centric workflow that brought together art, animation, and coding. It was widely used for advertisements, online games, video, and countless other web applications and educational tools. The Adobe Flash Player proved very popular. For many years, Flash was the dominant platform for online multimedia content.

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