Flash games became a billion-dollar business as sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, and Kongregate attracted millions of users. Amateur programmers across the world took this software – initially built for graphic designers and started making games. In the early part of the new millennium, Flash became the backbone for nearly every major video player and website, including YouTube, Hulu, and BBC Online. FutureSplash Animator was eventually shortened to Flash, and it came to dominate the internet.īy the end of the decade, 99 percent of online computers ran Flash.

To solve this problem, a group of engineers at FutureWave Software took a program, originally designed for drawing on tablet computers, and transformed it into a vector graphics animation tool that allowed animated images to swim through phone lines.

But access to that information was slow – it took nearly 10 minutes to download a single song – and web designers were in a constant battle to build splashy websites that didn’t cripple dial-up modems. During the ’90s, the internet slowly grew into a massive web of information that eventually reshaped entire industries.

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