Flash was awesome for learning script and rendering. Plugins in the early days of the web '95-'05+ were needed to push the web. HTML5, WebGL, Canvas, SVG are a

Flash was awesome for learning script and rendering. Plugins in the early days of the web '95-'05+ were needed to push the web. HTML5, WebGL, Canvas, SVG are all heavily inspired by Flash. Mobile and smaller hardware really put a pause on Flash's blaze of glory that was all the way up until '07/flex/air etc. Adobe did not move to cross-compilation fast enough nor did they improve hardware rendering early enough, Flash was largely run on CPU at the time and mobile performance was poor. Adobe also really took it hard that ES4 was shutdown and ActionScript was really the only use of that, I particularly liked it alot, ActionScript3 was a great language for interactive and web game development. Flash also allowed creators to publish, many cartoon shows today still use Flash [1]. Many have moved to ToonBoom or others but many still use it. Flash will always be an impressive moment in the web and interactives/games. Macromedia was quite the company, Flash/Director both really died from Adobe's hands. I wonder if Microsoft would have bought Macromedia if it had gone different. Macromedia really created fast web video with Flash/ASF formats/RTMP streaming and saved us from Real Player, Quicktime, and Windows Media Player. Flash made possible Youtube. Flash is still around as Adobe Animate and OSS as OpenFL[2], lime[3], Haxe [4] and more. Though it is more focused on compilation to target platforms natively from script and AOT compiling or WebGL/html5 output rather than to the AVM or runtime ActionScript. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_television_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis... [2] http://www.openfl.org/ http://www.openfl.org/ [3] https://github.com/openfl/lime https://github.com/openfl/lime [4] https://haxe.org/ https://haxe.org/