[adimitrov]

Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia.

Also, Flash gets a lot of flak, but it saved us from applets and ActiveX. It also enabled multi media content on a web that was not yet as standardised and functional as today's.

Acrobat reader on the other hand, is pure cancer, and has seen many security holes. PDF is useful, but there are far better PDF readers.

[a2tech]

And Flash enabled such a rich multimedia experience on the web in a time when broadband wasn't to be assumed. I remember playing very in-depth games on Newgrounds back in the day via Flash, via a very slow 56k dialup connection. There's no way to replicate that experience these days (easily anyway). The tooling around Flash was all very impressive. Sure the web changed and people turned on Flash, but that doesn't mean it didn't fill a very important niche for a long time.

[zepto]

> There's no way to replicate that experience these days (easily anyway).

There are still a few dialup services that do 56k.

[input_sh]

But also Macromedia did not birth Flash, they acquired FutureWave and renamed it (from FutureSplash Animator to Micromedia Flash).

But your point still stands, it became popular during Macromedia age.

[adimitrov]

I did not claim Macromedia birthed Flash! :D

But I also didn't know about FutureSplash Animator. Thanks, learned something new.

[dumpsterdiver]

> Adobe did not birth Flash, they bought it, through Macromedia.

Thanks for the correction. I didn't know that.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

And of course After Effects is not originally from Adobe either, being bought through Aldus who in turn got it from CoSA. It's funny how much pointless early 90s computer trivia I still recall from playing with promotional CD-ROMs as a child.