Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>It is almost forgotten now, but the platform which carried Java to critical mass was the browser

I think that's backwards. I was there. Aside from a few e.g. banking and government applets one was forced to use and a couple of exceptions, applets never got anywhere and died fast.

Enterprise Java became what Java is all about very very soon. Java landed in 1996. Servlets/Tomcat landed in 1998.

By 2000 there was plenty of enterprise Java development - in fact that was the year MS created its own Java copy, in the form of C#/.NET after having tried to extend their version of Java for the Windows platform.

View on HN

Back when Flash was called Shockwave, it was competing with Java applets for browser games. It did lose, but it was out there.

Minor nit, Shockwave wasn't the same as Flash. All three plus ActiveX overlapped in their time on the market, which is hair-raising to think about.

Was Shockwave a platform for Flash then, or something?

I don't know any technical details here, but from a user perspective Shockwave did turn into Flash. The Flash file extension "swf" even stands for "ShockWave Flash".

It was two separate products with separate origins. Macromedia had Shockwave and then they purchased Flash (which was called Splash then) and branded it Shockwave Flash.

Shockwave was somewhat similar to Flash, but it was developed for the "multimedia" CD-ROM's, which meant the files was generally too big for online. Flash was much more compact which is why it won out.

Shockwave = plugin for playing Macromedia Director content. Director was a GUI builder for interactive multimedia apps which were programmed in a custom language called Lingo.

Flash was originally called FutureSplash, if I recall correctly. When Macromedia bought it they rebranded it to fit their general branding theme, hence the confusion. Flash wasn't really intended to be an app platform, it started out as a vector animation format, but later they added scripting using a dialect of JavaScript called ActionScript.

Most users ended up with the Flash plugin but not the Shockwave plugin. Macromedia Director was huge in its day - my first programming job involved writing Lingo - but it died out pretty quick when the internet started taking off.

> Flash was originally called FutureSplash

So had the renaming taken place now in stead of twenty years ago, it would be called F7lash in stead of just Flash.

Shockwave was Flash's larger brother, feature wise. Shockwave stuff could contain Flash files, but Shockwave could do things Flash couldn't, or could do them earlier. (And if I remember correctly Shockwave came first, and when Macromedia aquired it they then build Flash)

Notably, Linux support for Shockwave was missing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com