The Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library known for Wayback Machine – announced that it has started saving Flash animations and games, ahead of the planned removal of Adobe Flash from all web applications at the end of 2020.
The Internet Archive will display this content to work as it once did, retaining critical elements of early Internet culture for browsers that can no longer run.
The Internet Archive reports that you can already browse in more than 1.000 games and animations it has saved, such as the classic "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" and "All your base belong to us".
The organization says emulation is possible from an evolving Flash called Ruffle, and has been integrated into his system. Ruffle's developers report that while it is currently not compatible with the majority of Flash projects developed after 2013, having access to the culture that defined many people's adolescence and adulthood is certainly a small victory.
Flash was almost essential to the creativity of the early web, giving text pages and pictures traffic, but as the Internet Archive notes, Flash was really important because it was relatively easy to use:
The software it allowed beginners to make amazingly complex and flexible graphics and audio performances that ran beautifully in web browsers without requiring deep knowledge of individual operating systems and programming languages.
