I was sick yesterday, but nobody else seems to have blogged this. 5 December 1995 was the release date for the public beta of the Shockwave Player for Director on Windows. At the time, Shockwave was a sort of generic term for a variety of Macromedia online initiatives, including Authorware, Freehand, and xRes (which involved a player and a server-side application that intelligently delivered portions of high-resolution images stored in xRes’s pyramidal file scheme). Director files were run through a separate tool called Afterburner. Playback on Macs was still a few months off. Flash (as a MM product) was more than a year in the future. We owned online multimedia then.