Let's take a quick trip down memory lane. It's 2006 and you're wondering where you should eat tonight. So you fire up your Gateway, ?flick on Internet Explorer, and Google some local restaurants. You load up some Italian place's website, wait for Flash to load, listen to some blaring cello play in the background, and search for the tiny speaker button. You can't immediately find the damn place's business hours. Parts of the site are broken, but you eventually find, in a nested menu, written in some awful cursive font, that it is closed Mondays. Damn.

In the early 2000s, Flash was seemingly a hallmark of forward-thinking web design. It was inarguably a powerful program—it could play music and video, take inputs (Flash games!), link elsewhere, and do lots of other highly useful things.

And then, Steve Jobs didn't include Flash support in the iPhone. Everyone freaked out.

It got worse in 2010. ?Jobs called Flash outdated, proprietary, resource intensive, and bad for mobile. At the time, Flash was used in 28 percent of all websites, according to W3Techs, ?a company that surveys web technology. Today, it's used in just over 11 percent of all websites.

"When Jobs said no more Flash, that murdered it. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen," Jason Scott, an archivist at the Internet Archive and a collector of rare internet files, told me. "Adobe killed it in their sleep after that, they seemed happy to step on it."

Flash is still limping along, of course. You'll rarely find a desktop or laptop that can't play Flash files, and despite what Scott said, Jobs alone isn't to fault for Flash's decline. Developers had been looking forward to widespread adoption of HTML5 and other Flash replacements for years, and ?subsequent moves away from Flash by YouTube and web designers in general have played an important role in its slow demise.

"In creating an emulator or other method of playing these, it's more like the performance of a play instead of the text in a book"

But this story isn't about how or why Flash is dying: It's about why we have to remember it.

"That was an extremely important era, Flash as a part of art, culture, gaming, and expression," Scott said.

And yes, awful, unusable restaurant websites are part of that. An important part, in fact. In the future, maybe you'll be able to read Farhad Manjoo's ?seminal takedown of the crappy restaurant website, but it's another thing altogether to experience it. Primary sources are ideal for class projects and research papers, after all. Playing a video game or watching a movie is much better than reading about it in a book.

It's impossible to save everything, but you've got to save some things. There's sites like Newgrounds and Ebaums World, which still live on and still rely on Flash. There's the Flash games that went viral, back when you had to use AIM and email to actually "go viral," back before going viral was even a thing. There are intros to countless thousands of websites; hell, there's countless thousands of websites that are made entirely of Flash elements. The thing is, none of this is terribly easy to archive.

"I think we're also deceiving ourselves if we pretend that digital technologies mean it's possible to save everything from everywhere, forever," Andrew Russell, an ?internet historian at Stevens Institute of Technology, told me. "But yes, it matters."