Flash has a fascinating history. In 20 years, it developed from a sketching program for pen computers to a framework which brought together sound, video and interactivity across a broad range of internet enabled devices becoming the standard for millions of websites worldwide.

Jonathan Gay is the co-creator of Flash. He founded FutureWave in 1993 to with the intention of dominating the market for graphics software on pen computers. A year later the company’s first product SmartSketch, was a short-lived success when AT&T decided to end support for the PenPoint operating system.

In 1995, Jon and his team added animation features to SmartSketch with the idea of making animation playable over the Internet. This program eventually sold as FutureSplash Animator and was used by some of the biggest brands on the web including MSN and Disney Online.

In December 1996. FutureWave Software was sold to Macromedia and FutureSplash Animator became Macromedia Flash.

Of course Flash has its downsides. It slowed down computers and reputed to be loved by hackers for its security vulnerabilities.

In a nicely worded piece describing the history of Flash Jon Gay wrote:

“If you think Flash is difficult to use, you should try drawing with a joystick on an Apple II before the concept of undo was invented.”

After leaving Macromedia, Jonathan Co-founded Greenbox Technology, a clean tech start-up, consumers to better understand their energy consumption and conservation possibilities.

Greenbox was acquired by Silver Spring Networks in 2009. In his spare time, Jon breeds cows and plants willow trees at Freestone Ranch in Sanoma. Jon has a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.

RM:

Jon were you interested in computers when you were growing up or was computing something you learned as the computer craze hit the US in the 1970s?

JG:

My parents bought me an Apple II with an audiotape drive for storage in junior high school and learned programming on it. I then got a Mac when they first came out in 1984 and started writing games for it in high school.

RM:

Did you learn to program by trial and error or did you have a good understanding of what a programming language was, how it worked and how you needed to think about it?

JG:

For me, the key to learning is curiosity and motivation. You have to be curious to learn by experimenting and reading. You also have to be motivated to build a significant project to learn how to manage a project and what is needed to create a product.

RM:

You must have experienced C++ when it first launched. When I spoke with Niklaus Wirth he said that “C++ is a language that was designed to cater to everybody’s perceived needs. As a result, the language and even more so its implementations have become complex and bulky, difficult to understand, and likely to contain errors for ever.”

JG:

My earliest programming was mostly in Pascal and assembly language but I was a fairly early user of Cfront on the Macintosh.

RM:

Is that something you agree with or have you found it efficient for some projects? Do you find inheritance with OO a mixed blessing?

JG:

I certainly think that C++ has become too complicated. The beauty of C was that a skilled programmer could understand what machine instructions your code would generate and thus write very efficient code. This was important when CPU and memory were very limited. The tools that C++ provided for organizing your code with were helpful but as you layered more abstractions in the language, you lost the benefits of your connection to the CPU while having a more complex environment to work in.

RM:

What was the real challenge with creating sophisticated software in the days of Apple II?

JG:

The real challenge was to create something simple that was interesting. Constraints help drive peoples creativity so having a limited platform and building something interesting on it is part of the creative process.

RM:

Adobe famously declined FutureSplash, was it the kind of thing that you woke up the next morning and said say, ‘Ah, I’ve got it. I know what I’ll do’ Or did you it take you several runs up the hill to work out what you would do next?

JG:

At the time we spoke with Adobe, it was very early for us. We only had the beginnings of our animation and web technology. We were exploring different possibilities to find an easier way to market with our technology and ideas. The fact that none of those early conversations led to anything for us simply meant that we needed to keep moving forward with building our product and seeing if a market developed.

RM:

If there had been a vibrant VC market around at the time would you have accepted outside funding and grew FutureSplash as a standalone business? Would the uptake of Flash worked faster anywhere in the world other than the US?

JG:

We certainly would have been happy to accept investment to grow Futurewave as a company but the business opportunity was not clear enough to attract a significant investor.

RM:

How has Flash thrived? Security must be high up on the list?

JG:

The key for Flash was that it all worked. It was not perfect but it did pretty well at everything it needed to. You had to have all the pieces in place. You needed a tool, it needed to be reliable and fast, people needed to have the player, it needed to be safe and secure and it needed to do things that people found interesting. There were many products over the years that we were competitive with Flash but very few of them actually worked. My favourite example is Java in the web browser. We were very concerned that Java in the web browser would displace the Flash Player but Java in the browser never worked well enough for anyone to use it. Microsoft actually made Java work in Internet Explorer reasonable well but Netscape and Sun never got it to work well in the Netscape browser.

RM:

Did anyone particularly help as a mentor when you were first starting out in business?

JG:

Certainly, Charlie Jackson who started the first company that I worked for helped me understand what it takes to build a good product and focus on customers.

RM:

What do you think is the biggest change in the way you think about programming compared to back when you started programming?

JG:

When I started on the Apple II, programming was the only way to express yourself on a computer. Now computers have a huge variety of tools for expression. You can build iPhone apps, you can contribute to open source projects, you can blog, you can use photoshop, you can create a Facebook personality. I think any of these things where you build up something significant on a computer is a kind of programming. To me it’s interesting to appreciate this diversity and explore ways to help people create new things in fun and interesting ways.

RM:

Have you had business ideas since Flash which were ahead of their time and not taken seriously?

JG:

I was part of a team that created a company called Greenbox to help people reduce their energy usage at home. There are some simple and powerful things that can be done here but as the recession reduced electricity demand and new drilling technology drove down the price of natural gas, the demand for the Greenbox product did not develop. I do hope that in the near future it will become economically attractive to invest in reducing your energy usage.
Currently, I’m working on a new project with some former members of the Flash team to explore how people can use the photo and video capabilities of their mobile devices to tell stories. I’m excited about the possibility of working with the design community to see if there are some new creative models that leverage rich media, storytelling and the devices we are all carrying in our pockets.

RM:

What’s your view of Silverlight?

JG:

People like to create things. The beauty of Flash was that you could create interesting visual and interactive content and share it with millions of people much more easily and quickly than was possible before.
Flash found a moment in time when there was a very significant audience for its capabilities. Today, people’s energy is going into building rich HTML applications and native mobile applications. It’s hard to imagine that Silverlight will ever establish itself as a widely used technology.
I think even Microsoft would rather people invest in building mobile Windows apps instead of Silverlight content. I do wish there were better tools to enable creative people to build and share interactive content without complex programming.

RM:

How would you have made money from your skills if you hadn’t developed an interest in computing? Would you have become an architect?

JG:

I did aspire to become and architect when I was young although I have heard that it can be a difficult way to make money. One of my favourite memories of Flash is meeting an architect that was an enthusiastic Flash developer because he could build a profitable business with Flash when it was very difficult to make money as an architect.
I enjoy building things and software was fantastic because as a kid, you could build significant things with pixels and electrons while it was difficult to have tools and materials to create buildings. I think a skill and passion for building things is always valuable and that I could have enjoyed applying that in many different areas.