Flash did much more than just allow people to play games. Sure it did video and animation, but when the Flex framework came around, it was also able to make applications and rich user interfaces. HTML5 can do this too, but it is much more complicated to do so and there are no authoring tools/IDEs that make the process simple and efficient for non-programmers.
Flash had a great authoring tool and it could create single file packages that you could easily embed in a web page without having much technical knowledge. This let creative people build great content and the web exploded because of that fact. HTML5 doesn't give us that strong ability and non-technical creative types are locked out of the process of building content, games and applications because there is nothing to help them along. This is the main reason HTML5 has failed to deliver on the promises. No one is trying to fix this since there is no incentive for do so in the open source world.
I know flash did more than games, and I've heard about it's emergence on the internet. I was first using the internet in the early 90s. I remember all sorts of changes. I don't recall when flash came out exactly, but I think it was about when I started using the internet.
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