What happened to the two developers who created Flash in 1993

In 1993, two American programmers Jonathan Gay (left) and Robert Tatsumi (right) founded Future Wave Software and launched SmartSketch, a vector editor for drawing illustrations with a stylus on tablets of the time .

In May 1996, Future Wave Software released a second version of the program called FutureSplash Animator, where animation had already appeared, and the program itself could be installed as a plug-in to the Netscape browser. In December 1996, Macromedia bought the developers, and FutureSplash Animator was renamed Macromedia Flash 1.0. Nine years later, Macromedia, in turn, became part of Adobe Corporation, and the product was renamed Adobe Flash.

What is the fate of the two programmers who created such a wonderful technology? Attendly reporters conducted a small investigation .

Jonathan Gay was already an experienced programmer: since 1985 (from school) he worked at Silicon Beach Software, where he created games and other software for Macintosh computers: SuperPaint graphics editor, Digital Darkroom photo editor, Airborne !, Dark Castle games, etc.

Gay and Tatsumi lead Flash at Macromedia. Although Jonathan received the position of vice president of company development, he still wrote code for Flash 1-4, in particular, he wrote all of the low-level rasterization of vector graphics, created new drawing tools and the Flash Player Netscape plug-in for the browser. In turn, Tatsumi was responsible for the UI and created the authoring tool Flash. In the days of the early releases of Flash 1-4, the development team was practically not replenished with new programmers, but when the technology proved its success, an intensive recruitment began: by 2001, 50 people were already working on Flash, and the founders of the project moved away from coding to planning and team management.

On April 18, 2005, it became known that Adobe was buying Macromedia, Jonathan Gay announced that he would not participate in this and was about to resign from the post of technical director of Macromedia.

In August 2006, Gay and Tatsumi founded the new company Software as Art, later renamed Greenbox , which created systems for visualization and energy management in homes.



The initial investment for the Software as Art startup was given by Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess and Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson. As a result, Greenbox was also successfully sold - this time to Silver Spring Networkin 2009, which deals with integrated solutions for the implementation of “smart grids” with IPv6 support.

Robert Tatsumi joined the Silver Spring Network and works there as Principal Program Engineer, including developing a front-end portal for customer service using Python, Django, and JQuery.

Jonathan Gay and completely left the IT business and engaged in organic farming . In particular, he sells a very expensive “grass-fed beef” for select customers.