While in high school, Gay won a science fair award for programming on an Apple II computer and came to the attention of Silicon Beach Software founder Charlie Jackson.
After graduating from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, Gay worked full-time for Silicon Beach Software.
During this time he added some significant features to Superpaint 2, including Bézier curves, and began work on IntelliDraw, which was published by Aldus Corporation after the acquisition of Silicon Beach Software in 1990.
[2] Gay and programmer Robert Tatsumi finished the company's first product in 1994, SmartSketch, a vector-drawing program for the PenPoint operating system.
When MSN and Disney decided to use FutureSplash Animator for their websites, Macromedia made an offer to buy FutureWave Software and the acquisition was completed in December, 1996.
Initially, the nascent Flash team within Macromedia was quite small, with few engineers beyond Gay and Tatsumi, and corporate R&D investment in Director remained high.
In an unusual move for a vice president, Gay continued to be responsible for a great deal of the actual coding on the product.
He was responsible for the low-level vector graphics rasterization, pen-computing inspired drawing tools, and the Flash Player Netscape browser plug-in.
An important addition to the team was programmer Gary Grossman, who implemented a subset of JavaScript (called ActionScript) into Flash 4.
When Jon returned, he was armed with a vision for a new class of Web applications that enabled communication, collaboration and what he called "online storytelling."
Ben Dillon and Peter Santangeli went on to found the Breeze team at Macromedia, building an enterprise-class Web conferencing, E-Learning and collaboration system on top of the Flash Media Server.
Despite the possibly revolutionary nature of the communication capabilities of the Flash Media Server, it did not meet initially with great business success.
By building a solution on top of Breeze, the Breeze team had many goals: it sought to demonstrate what kind of applications could be built on the Flash Media Server platform, explore a new business model for a company traditionally focused on shrink-wrap tools software, and understand the attendant difficulties in building applications on the Flash Media Server platform.