What happened to the two developers who created Flash in 1993

In 1993, two American programmers Jonathan Gay (left) and Robert Tatsumi (right) founded the company Future Wave Software and released the vector editor SmartSketch to draw stylus illustrations on tablet computers of the time .

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

What is the fate of two programmers who have created such a wonderful technology? Attendly journalists 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 image editor, Digital Darkroom photo editor, Airborne games, Dark Castle, etc.

Gay and Tatsumi led the Flash department at Macromedia. Although Jonathan got the position of vice president of development for the company, 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 plugin for the browser. In turn, Tatsumi was responsible for the UI and created the Flash authoring tool. During the early releases of Flash 1-4, the development team was practically not replenished by new programmers, but when the technology proved its success, an intensive recruitment of personnel began: by 2001, 50 people were already working on Flash, and the founders of the project moved from coding to planning and managing a team.

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

In August 2006, Gay and Tatsumi founded a new company, Software as Art, later renamed Greenbox , which created systems for visualizing and managing household energy consumption.



Initial investment for the start-up of Software as Art was given by Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess and Macromedia CFO Betsey Nelson. As a result, Greenbox was also successfully sold - this time to the company Silver Spring Network in 2009, which deals with complex solutions for the implementation of "smart grids" with IPv6 support.

Robert Tatsumi moved to Silver Spring Network and works there as a lead programmer (Principal Software Engineer), including developing a front-end portal for customer service using Python, Django and JQuery.

Jonathan Gay and completely out of the IT business and engaged in environmentally friendly agriculture . In particular, he sells very expensive grass-fed beef (grass-fed beef) for selected customers.