[astrodust]

Adobe Flash, formerly Macromedia Flash, formerly a vector-based font-authoring tool rejigged into an animation system called FutureSplash.

It's no wonder the thing is so jammed full of fossilized code. Legacy platform support. Legacy plugin support. The whole thing is a museum of bad ideas and shoddy implementations done by people who no longer work for companies that don't even exist.

It was wildly successful, beating out even its brother Director slash ShockWave, which is an admirable achievement, yet did not come without a cost. Like Windows its success has saddled it with an enormous base of users and developers to keep content.