Mikka Gatdula

History of MS PowerPoint
PowerPoint was originally developed by Bob Gaskins, a former
Berkeley Ph.D. student who envisioned an easy-to-use
presentation program that would manipulate a string of slides. In
1984, Gaskins joined a failing Silicon Valley software firm called
Forethought and hired a software developer, Dennis Austin. Their
prototype program was called "Presenter", but was changed to
PowerPoint to avoid a trademark problem.
PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It
ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages that a
photocopier could turn into overhead transparencies.
Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by
Microsoft Corporation for $14 million. In 1988 the first Windows
and DOS versions were produced. Since 1990, PowerPoint has
been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications.
The 2002 version, part of the Office XP Professional suite and
also available as a stand-alone product, provides features such
as comparing and merging changes in presentations, the ability
to define animation paths for individual shapes,
pyramid/radial/target and Venn diagrams, multiple slide masters,
a "task pane" to view and select text and objects on the
clipboard, password protection for presentations, automatic
"photo album" generation, and the use of "smart tags" allowing
people to quickly select the format of text copied into the
presentation.
Being part of Microsoft Office has allowed PowerPoint to become
the world's most widely used presentation program. As Microsoft
Office files are often sent from one computer user to another,
arguably the most important feature of any presentation
software -- such as Apple's Keynote, or OpenOffice.org Impress -has become the ability to open PowerPoint files. However,
because of PowerPoint's ability to embed content from other
applications through OLE, some kinds of presentations become
highly tied to the Windows platform, meaning that even
PowerPoint on e.g. Mac OS cannot always successfully open its
own files originating in the Windows version. This has led to a
movement towards open standards, such as PDF and OASIS.
Originally designed for the Macintosh computer, the initial
release was called "Presenter", developed by Dennis Austin and
Thomas Rudkin of Forethought, Inc.] In 1987, it was renamed to
"PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks, the idea for the

name coming from Robert Gaskins.In August of the same year,

Forethought was bought by Microsoft for $14 million USD
($29.1 million in present-day terms), and became Microsoft's
Graphics Business Unit, which continued to develop the software
further. PowerPoint was officially launched on May 22, 1990, the
same day that Microsoft released Windows 3.0.
PowerPoint introduced many new changes with the release of
PowerPoint 97. Prior to PowerPoint 97, presentations were linear,
always proceeding from one slide to the next. PowerPoint 97
incorporated the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language,
underlying all macro generation in Office 97, which allowed users
to invoke pre-defined transitions and effects in a non-linear
movie-like style without having to learn programming.
PowerPoint 2000 (and the rest of the Office 2000 suite)
introduced a clipboard that could hold multiple objects at once.
Another change was that the Office Assistant was changed to be
less intrusive.PowerPoint 2002 massively overhauled the
animation engine, allowing users to create more advanced and
custom animations. As of 2012, various versions of PowerPoint
claim ~95% of the presentation software market share, with
installations on at least 1 billion computers. Among presenters
world-wide, this program is used at an estimated frequency of
350 times per second.

Versions
1990 PowerPoint 2.0 for Windows 3.0
1992 PowerPoint 3.0 for Windows 3.1
1993 PowerPoint 4.0 (Office 4.x)
1995 PowerPoint for Windows 95 (version 7.0; Office 95)
1997 PowerPoint 97 (version 8.0; Office 97)
1999 PowerPoint 2000 (version 9.0; Office 2000)
2001 PowerPoint 2002 (version 10; Office XP)
2003 Office PowerPoint 2003 (version 11; Office 2003)
2007 Office PowerPoint 2007 (version 12; Office 2007)
2010 PowerPoint 2010 (version 14; Office 2010)
2013 PowerPoint 2013 (version 15; Office 2013)
*There is no PowerPoint version 5.0 or 6.0, because the Windows
95 version was launched with Word 7.0. All Office 95 products
have OLE 2 capacitymoving data automatically from various
programsand PowerPoint 7.0 shows that it was contemporary
with Word 7.0.
*Version number 13 was skipped due to superstition.

Companies
From the creation of stunning PowerPoint decks created at
the 11th hour for a major pitch, to PowerPoint slide libraries
to help them build their own presentations much more
quickly and easily, to interactive profit calculator tools to
help them structure a deal in a meeting, to photorealistic 3D
virtual tools to help them tell a complicated story, our
bespoke solutions are developed around the exact
requirement of the sales teams.

Involved in MS PowerPoint
Robert Gaskins (who invented the idea, managed its design
and development, and then headed the new Microsoft group)
has written this book to commemorate the twenty-fifth
anniversary of PowerPoint, recounting stories of the perils
narrowly evaded as a startup, dissecting the complexities of
being the first distant development group in Microsoft, and
explaining decisions and insights that enabled PowerPoint to
become a lasting success.