Macromedia Shockwave |work| Access

Because Director was built for CD-ROMs (unlimited storage), developers ported huge assets directly to the web. You would wait 4 minutes for a progress bar to load a "game" that was actually a 15MB Director file. Performance was abysmal on anything less than a top-tier Pentium III.

Under the hood, Lingo was a robust, object-oriented scripting language. It was forgiving for beginners (typing go to frame "Start" ) but powerful enough for full game physics engines and database connections. The Bad: Why It Died a Painful Death 1. The Installation & Stability Nightmare Shockwave was a heavy plugin (~5-10MB when most people had 56k dial-up). It required a full system restart after install. It crashed constantly. A corrupted Shockwave plugin often meant reinstalling your entire browser. It was the "Java applet" of its day—powerful, but you held your breath every time it loaded. macromedia shockwave

However, Shockwave gave us , WebRTC before WebRTC , and gaming portals (Miniclip, Shockwave.com) before Steam. Because Director was built for CD-ROMs (unlimited storage),