Flash animations are everywhere. If you watch a youtube video is is running on flash. Flash started out being produced by MacroMedia before that MacroMind and was acquired by Adobe. I started doing computer animations in 1987 and folded into the MacroMind flow by buying VideoWorks II which morphed into MacroMind Director.

I was passed on an Apple Desk Accessory called Chemintosh which was produced by Craig Shelly. I was supposed to take it and write an article sort of a book report on some computer software for this CP/M users group called BAKUP which had associated with it a CP/M based bulletin board for which I was an assistant sysop.
Chemintosh allowed one to create chemical symbols. Chemintosh was an evaluation copy so one could create an image but unless you paid the license fee you could not save the image. Macintosh had a screen capture mechanism however and I saved the images created that way. MacroMind Director(MMD) is a spreadsheet and database for graphic images. MMD allowed graphic images to be displayed on the screen over a time course. I animated with those tools the reaction mechanism for the dehydration reaction of alcohols in HMPT. The name for the reaction mechanism was "complex autocatalysis" I had by that time mixed some chemicals together in a particular way, extracted samples over a time course and expressed the solution of the problem as a mathematical equation and I have called the process "Solving a Chemical Physics Problem"

Nobody cared.

The differential equation produced from the theoretical idea that I came up with to explain the puzzling behavior I saw when analyzing the samples from the chemical reaction is the method of undetermined multipliers. I knew what a gas chromatograph was and that was enough to get a job interview with Donald Crosby of Environmental Toxicology at UC Davis. When I started to go through the process of solving the differential equation they stopped me and that started my being recruited into a Ph.D. program which I never finished. I was going to solve it by the method of undetermined multipliers.

The animation of the chemical reaction produced a file which when process by a MacroMedia tool became something that you could display on a web page and as soon as the web came along to allow this I did that. Curiously as time passed the web browser plug in that allowed the animation to be displayed would stop working and I would have to find a plugin somewhere, download it and install it. This was a repeating process. What I found out recently is that a flash animation will allow a network socket to be established in your computer to allow a network connection to some other place, evil.com for example.

Javascript can run inside a flash animation. Firefox and Safari put up alert boxes when a script running inside this flash animation or maybe not in a flash app stating that the script running may make the browser un responsive. After repeated crashes of Safari where I was allowed to file a report I complained to Apple that when such an alert box is put up it should tell me what browser window is responsible and I was rewarded today when the alert box came up one more time that my request had been fulfilled.