How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?
And that was a bit obvious in the late 80's. Somewhat obvious in the 90's. Very obvious in the early 2000's.
In contrast, Flash was an Adobe acquisition which they never had a clear vision for and the model of selling tools but giving away the runtime for free meant that your app being popular didn't make more money for them. Anything security-exposed like this needs substantial amounts of ongoing maintenance funding but from Adobe's perspective that was mostly overhead or something Google would subsidize for them.
But at the same time, proprietary technologies rules much of our world, back then, now, and likely in the future.
If there had been multiple SWF engines out there, to a common interpreter protocol, SWF content might have had a better chance of outliving the death of Adobe Flash.
I assume the same way we preserve long dead consoles. Emulation. It isn't difficult to set up a VM with older copies of windows.
https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
Got mentioned on this site a few times too.
The "useful tools" have been replaced with better tools available today. It's the same reason why most people don't use a rock and chisel to build a house - better tools exist and older tools have been abandoned or mentioned in history books.
Plenty of games, musical bands, and artwork over the last century have been lost to time and forgotten. There's plenty of Jazz music in the 1930's and 40's that was never recorded to paper or vinyl. And that's OK. People moved on to other forms of art.
If you bought a cast iron skillet in the 1940:s, chances are you can still cook with it if you've treated it right.
If your favorite game is a Flash game bought in 2010, you will not be able to play it anymore.
Is it because software is not as tangible that we accept just how fleeting its permanence is?
You can play a game of Monopoly, but it's not going to make you any friends.
But I think you can use the standalone flash player?