Director was originally meant for creating CD-ROM games. However, in the early 90's, it began finding a new home on the web. "Shockwave" was Macromedia's term which meant "compressed for the web." The first entry in the Shockwave line of products was Shockwave Director Player - so called because it could play Director Movies which had been compressed for the web. Because it was, at the time, the first and only product in the Shockwave line of products, Shockwave Director Player was often shortened to just "Shockwave."

Enter Flash. Again, Macromedia wanted Flash Movies to be able to be compressed so they could be downloaded quickly over the web - so they made the Shockwave Flash Player plugin, so called because it could play Flash Movies which had been compressed for the web. So there was Shockwave Director Player, to play compressed Director Movies, and Shockwave Flash Player, to play compressed Flash Movies.

The problem is, by this point, everyone already knew Shockwave Director Player as just "Shockwave." To those uninformed, it seemed that there was now both a Shockwave AND a Shockwave Flash. Shockwave Flash Player was more often referred to as just Flash, to avoid confusion with what was already being referred to as Shockwave.

So when we say Shockwave, we're referring to the first word in Shockwave Director Player, but when we say Flash, we're referring to the second word in Shockwave Flash Player...

Or at least, this was the case until Adobe acquired these names from Macromedia, at which point they just decided to rename the plugins to what they were being popularly referred to as. Now what was Shockwave Director Player is officially just called Shockwave, and what was Shockwave Flash Player is officially just called Flash. In order to further undo the confusion, SWF was changed to stand for Small Web Files instead of ShockWave Flash.

As for useless trivia, Director actually even predates it's main use of producing multimedia CD-ROMs. When it was still a MacroMind product, it was used for stuff like the "getting started" floppy disk for early Macs (the tutorial where you learned how to use a mouse by feeding fish and stuff)

http://www.action-packed.net/q-design/examples/Instructional...

Thank you.

In fact, I totally forgot about Lingo until just now. But it actually looks pretty cool:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)

I̶f̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶L̶i̶n̶g̶o̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶i̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶y̶t̶e̶c̶o̶d̶e̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶a̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶A̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶S̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶l̶w̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶p̶r̶e̶t̶e̶d̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶m̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶.̶

Flash won over Shockwave because Flash Studio was more popular with animators and game creators than Macromedia Director.

There's some online tools that will do it for you, e.g.:

https://yaytext.com/strike/