Adobe Flash

 Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash.

Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web-page components, The origins of Flash start with the chain of thought that started with some ideas that Jonathan Gay had at school, then college and later working for Silicon Beach Software and its successors.[1] This started in the 1980s. In January of 1993, Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Welsh started a small software company called FutureWave and created their first product SmartSketch. A drawing application, SmartSketch was designed to make creating computer graphics as simple as drawing on paper.

Although SmartSketch was an innovative drawing application, it didn't gain enough of a foothold in its market. As the Internet began to thrive, FutureWave began to realize the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might easily challenge Macromedia's often slow-to-download Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and re-released it as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC.

By that time, the company had added a second programmer Robert Tatsumi, an artist Adam Grofcsik, and a PR specialist Ralph Mittman. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early (MSN) work with the Internet. In December 1996, Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software and later released it as Flash