Saviour of the animated universe

IDEA No 50

SCALEABLE VECTOR GRAPHICS

In 1997, users were upgrading from 28k to 33k modems. The information superhighway was far from super. In June, Macromedia released Flash – its vector graphic-driven files loaded ten times faster than HTML, with ten times the impact. The online experience was improved a hundredfold. Suddenly the Web looked like TV.

In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson and Michelle Welsh founded FutureWave Software. Their vision was to create a software application that allowed people to bypass the mouse and draw directly on a computer screen. They called it SmartSketch, but just as it was about to launch, AT&T scrapped PenPoint, the operating system it was built on. FutureWave had ...

Get 100 Ideas that Changed the Web now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.