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What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.

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The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine.

Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash.

Flash certainly became broadly hated. It had a pretty long stretch of being loved, and enabling content that was loved, though. Up until about 2005 or so, flash was critical tech for the young web. By 2010 it was clearly heading toward an end.

I remember strongly disliking Flash before 2005, and many tech-minded people I talked to agreed. It was an awful install, always needed an updated, was a memory hog, and was a pain in the ass to use without it crashing. Yes, it must have been great to create apps with (I never did), but it was not beloved. Flash games were beloved, not Flash.

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