What a difference a decade makes. In the year 2000 AOL was worth about $240 billion. It’s unlikely that you had heard the term WiFi or of a company named Google. A T1 line was considered blazing fast. More than 91% of home Internet connections were done at 56kbs or slower. A top line PC ran at about 600MHz and didn’t have the processing power of today’s smartphone. Apple was a joke. And mobile phones were used to make phone calls and that’s about it. If you watched video on the Internet it was probably through the RealPlayer. And you certainly didn’t watch it in HD because a big monitor was about 1024 x 768 – and it wasn’t an LCD.

There was no Facebook, no MySpace, no Twitter, and no Skype. Hell, there were very few places where you could even comment on someone else’s website. And everything was a website because very few people had heard the term blog before.

Evolution of the Flash Platform
There was no Flash Platform yet. Advanced Actionscript involved making dynamic MovieClips. ( Remember createEmptyMovieClip(). That used to be a big deal. )

We were still a few years away from Macromedia MAX 2003. Which as far as I can tell was the first MAX event. ( Update: there was DevCon and UCON which evolved into MAX. ) I even did a double-take while looking at the MAX 2003 page where it said:

On the web, we’re seeing a shift from inaction to interaction. To fill this need, Macromedia offers the Studio MX 2004 and Flex products to help designers and developers create more interactive web experiences.

Flex is that old? Wow! How far they have come.

The Flash Community
In 2000 the Flash community didn’t extend much beyond the walls of Macromedia. How could it. There were practically no books on the subject and I don’t know of any blogs. Not that it would matter because how would you ever find them? There was no RSS and searching the web was a mess.

Get a job
Very few people had fulltime jobs doing work with Flash. And if you did you were a designer. Even then most of the work involved the dreaded skip intro. Could anyone have guessed what lay ahead?

My guess
If you’d like to see what I do think lies ahead for us in the next decade then read the follow up to this post Predictions for the next decade.