The Flash History
Flash began as Jonathan Gay’s dream of being an architect. While designing sketches of houses, Gay came to the sad realization that there was not a lot of opportunity for him to actually see his designs in final form. It was when an Apple II entered his life that Gay began to program, and soon discovered that with writing programs, you can design something, build it and then see it work and respond to the user. His designs would now reach final form - however, his bits of Apple II Basic were not as impressive as building houses.
His first full program was a game, written in Basic, that was a copy of Space Invaders. From Basic he graduated to writing in Pascal; the language used to write his first graphics editor (SuperPaint) which he won an award for at his high school’s science fair.
Jonathan Gay got his break in professional programming while still in high school. When his Apple II was replaced with a Macintosh, Gay and his father began attending early Macintosh Users Group meetings, where his father bragged to the organizer of the group about his science fair project. As it turned out, the organizer was Charlie Jackson who was planning to launch a Macintosh software company under the name Silicon Beach Software.
Although at the time Charlie did not have a lot of funding for the project, he purchased a $10,000 Lisa for Gay to program on. It was on this computer that Gay wrote Airborne!, the first Macintosh game that used digital sound and smooth (for its era) animation. For a time, it was a big seller. Juegos 10
From games to drawing
When work began on a second game, a professional artist was hired and Dark Castle was born. Dark Castle was a big hit and paid Gay’s way through college. After Dark Castle, came Beyond Dark Castle. Writing games became an important part of Gay’s programming education by challenging him to combine animation with digital sound and synchronize the two elements. Most importantly, the concept of fast and responsive software became Gay’s first priority.
After Beyond Dark Castle, Gay began working on SuperPaint II (the follow up to his science fair project) in which he implemented PostScript style drawing. After SuperPaint II and graduating from college, Gay went to work for Silicon Beach Software full time and began to develop technology for creating a new generation of graphics software. It would be written in C++, and would use an object-oriented framework to make development easy and to enable it to run on the Macintosh and Windows. Minijuegos Gratis
This technology became a drawing program called Intellidraw that would enable Silicon Beach to compete with Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand (Freehand was later acquired by Macromedia) in the Postscript drawing market. The unique aspect of Intellidraw was that not only did it draw pictures, it allowed you to add behavior to your drawings so you could create lines that stayed connected to objects and you could draw a bar chart that would change as the user entered numbers into a text object. As it turned out the first computer drawing product, called SketchPad, had this ability but people had forgotten about it. A company called Visio was able to take this idea and create a very successful product from it, while that feature of Intellidraw never drew a substantial market. When it was realized that Intellidraw was destined to be a modest success, Gay decided it was time to find a new challenge. He had made as much money working part time as he had working full time on Intellidraw so it was decided that he would try and place himself in a position where he could create a successful product and benefit from it’s success - so he started his own company.
At this time in personal computing technology, pen computers (a screen you could write on with an electronic pen) were the latest ‘new thing’. A company called GO was building an operating system for a new generation of portable computers that would utilize this technology. The computers would be smaller and the user could take them virtually anywhere. It was a very appealing idea and with Silicon Beach Software, it was seen how a new operating system created the opportunity to build new software companies.
With the investment help of Charlie Jackson, FutureWave Software was launched in January of 1993, to dominate the market for graphics software on pen computers. Mini juegos
At this point, it was widely understood that it was hard for users to learn complex features in a program and that the real challenge was creating sophisticated software that is easy to use. Computer drawing was obviously slower and more awkward than drawing with a pencil on paper. Although Apple’s mouse had been an improvement over the joystick, drawing with an electronic pen directly on a computer screen would be even easier. With the help of Robert Tatsumi, Jonathan set out to build software that would make drawing on the computer as easy drawing on paper.
