A Brief History of Flash

Flash was originally developed strictly for the creation and animation of vector based artwork. Named "Future Splash", the application was acquired by the premier web creation application developers, Macromedia, in 1997. Macromedia promptly changed the application's name to "Flash" and refocused its primary mission from an animation program to a broad based tool for creating graphic content for the Internet.

Since its introduction, Flash has obtained ubiquity. The basic Flash application has spawned two professional based "authoring" applications; Flash Generator and Flash Freehand. The Flash Player plug-in is a key component that is bundled with most major browsers and operating systems. Flash "movies" featuring intricate animation, interactivity, and sound, created by both amateurs as well as professionals alike, appear on personal and corporate web sites across the Internet.

The power of Flash lies in its design. It is one of the few applications that brings together in one package the tools necessary for creating graphics, animating those graphics, turning those graphics into user interface elements, and giving the elements interactivity. Flash also creates the HTML necessary to take all of these elements and display them as a complete web page through any browser.