Flash Arrives

NOV 06 1996 · 12:00

Animated typography, the move Flash was built for. FutureSplash becomes Macromedia Flash 1.0. Place: Macromedia, San Francisco Figures: Jonathan Gay, lead developer · Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh, FutureWave co-founders · Macromedia, acquirer FutureWave Software releases FutureSplash Animator in 1995, a vector-animation tool for the web aimed at users who wanted smaller files than GIF for line-art animation. Macromedia acquires FutureWave on 6 November 1996 and rebrands the product as MACROMEDIA FLASH 1.0. The browser plugin (FutureSplash Player, renamed Flash Player) is bundled with Internet Explorer 4 in 1997, which solves the install-base problem in one stroke. Flash's pitch against GIF: vector graphics scale without pixelation, line-art animation files are dramatically smaller, the format is scriptable via ActionScript (1.0 in 2000, 2.0 in 2003, 3.0 in 2006), audio and video stream in the same container, interactivity is native. The pitch is technically correct on every axis. It still does not kill the GIF. Video: A walk through FutureSplash Animator months before Macromedia bought it in December 1996 and renamed it Flash 1.0.