FutureWave Software

» see futurewave.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Almost nobody who used this company's software knew its name, because the software was renamed twice after it left. Jonathan Gay and Charlie Jackson had come out of Silicon Beach Software, the Mac shareware house that Aldus swallowed in 1990, and in January 1993 they started FutureWave in San Diego with Michelle Welsh. Their bet was pen computing. The product was SmartSketch, a vector drawing program written for PenPoint OS on GO Corporation's tablets, and it was aimed at a market that was supposed to be enormous within two years.

The market did not appear. AT&T bought the EO tablet business and shut it down, PenPoint went with it, and FutureWave was left holding a well-built drawing application for a platform that had ceased to exist. So they ported it to Windows and Macintosh, where it landed in a fight it could not win against Illustrator and FreeHand, both of which had been in the market for years and had the professional accounts already.

The third attempt worked. Somebody noticed that the browser was becoming a place where things moved, that everything moving on it at the time was a horrible animated GIF, and that vectors would go down a modem far better than pixels ever would. They added frame-by-frame animation to the drawing program, wrote a browser plugin to play the output, and released it in May 1996 as FutureSplash Animator.

This is the part that reached me, though under a different name and a couple of years later. I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, and the entire argument for vector animation was written for exactly that connection. A shape described as coordinates and a fill color is a few kilobytes no matter how large it is drawn. The animated GIF equivalent was hundreds. Everything I later associated with the word Flash was really a compression argument that had been settled before I arrived.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the seven months ~

FutureSplash had an unusually good run for a product from a company nobody had heard of. Microsoft used it on MSN, which at that point was still trying to be a subscription network with real production values, and it needed something the web could not otherwise do. Disney used it for the Daily Blast. The Simpsons site ran it. Those are marquee references for a plugin that had existed for a matter of months.

Macromedia was watching, and had reason to. It owned Director and Shockwave, which did roughly this job on the web already, badly, because Director had been built for CD-ROMs and its files were far too large to send down a phone line. Buying FutureWave got the small-file version of the same idea plus the person who wrote it. The deal was announced in December 1996 and closed in January 1997 for a price nobody disclosed, which usually means it was not large.

~ what it became ~

FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash 1.0. Jonathan Gay stayed on and kept building it for years, through the versions that added scripting and turned an animation tool into an application platform. Macromedia went to Adobe in 2005 and the product went with it, so the thing carried three companies' names across its life while remaining recognizably the drawing program from the failed tablet.

Flash then ran the interactive web for about a decade and died badly in 2020, and there is already a grave for that. The FutureWave part is a different story with a different shape. It is what happens when a small team keeps the good engine and throws away the product around it twice, and the third guess lands on a platform shift that nobody in 1993 could have been aiming at.

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