Flash the thing to make websites and games.
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When the world wide web came out in the 90’s, it was mostly documents similar to wikipedia articles. The main way you interacted with them was to click from link to link. If you wanted something like a video game you had to install an executable file, usually from a CD rom or floppy disk. In addition to web document standards being simple, computers were much less powerful then so that created major limits to what could be shown or experienced on a web page. Movie content for example couldn’t be shown inline on a web page and there was no youtube. Then they released java and internet browsers started to support java applications which could run apps such as video games in a browser. Around the same time the company Macromedia introduced the Shockwave platform which did the same thing. While java was free to build, Shockwave had to be built with Macromedia’s software, but tended to be more professional. Both java and shockwave required a plugin to run. Over the years Shockwave became Flash and was bought by Adobe. Both java and flash became prone to security flaws over the years and with better performing computers, the HTML5 standard could ultimately do everything that flash and java apps could so for security reasons and to stop the hassle of updating plugins constantly, browser platforms stopped supporting java apps a long time ago and flash more recently. Youtube was actually still using the flash app well in to the 2010s and flash was ultimately phased out completely just a few years ago.
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