Despite the deal being struck in , it actually took a further three years for a Windows version of PowerPoint to be released. This was as a result of the software needing to be redeveloped for the Windows platform — the barrier that reportedly led to its initial release on the Macintosh in the first place. Text and graphics could be added to slides and a slide sorter allowed slide-decks to be organised. Two Infoworld articles from the time reflect the strides in development that Microsoft made.
The first, in , describes PowerPoint 3. For many people, Windows 95 was their first experience of Windows. Part of the reason for this were the new features with which it was shipped, such as a new graphical user interface, the recycle bin, the taskbar and, most famously, the start menu.
It boasted a slicker interface and the ability for users to move their presentations between computers more easily than had previously been the case. In many ways, it was the first in a new era for PowerPoint that continues to this day. Where once the company had been playing catch-up with new features, now it was innovating. Although less celebrated than some earlier versions, PowerPoint introduced a number of major features that are still with us today.
Most notably, a new tri-pane view that displayed slides, outlines and notes within the same screen. Automatic resizing of both slides and text was introduced, meaning we were no longer faced with text running off slides and slides that were too magnified, and so too was the ability to create tables within the programme itself.
In the early s, two more versions of PowerPoint followed in quick succession. PowerPoint and saw iterative changes that were more evolution than revolution. These included new Outline and Slide thumbnail views, image compression and rotation advances, ways to navigate slide-decks and annotation options. PowerPoint 97 brought new changes to the old version with major upgrades. Earlier versions had linear presentations, whereas, the incorporation of Visual Basic for Applications VBA language allowed users to invoke pre-defined transitions and effects within a non-linear style, similar to a movie.
The best part was that these transitions and effects required no programming knowledge by the end user. From version 97 onwards, PowerPoint came up with new features and better templates that improved according to the different UIs and graphics introduced with the passage of time.
Before there was the Modern UI, who can forget Windows 98 or Windows especially if you are a child of the 90s , which now seems like a UI for a bit game.
However, it was not only the UI but other major features that evolved PowerPoint with the passage of time, including the improved Ribbon UI, better formatting tools, web integration, video and audio embedding features and more.
PowerPoint releases for Microsoft Windows between included PowerPoint , , , and , whereas, the Mac versions between included; PowerPoint , , X, , and The latest version of PowerPoint for Mac till date is version PowerPoint came with increased efficiency and the ability to present presentations remotely, which was a feature geared towards professional users to help them improve communication and reduce travel costs. I and all the rest of the PowerPoint people, plus many of our other Forethought employees, became Microsoft employees, just a year or so after the Microsoft IPO.
The New York Times reported on 31 July Forethought makes a program called Powerpoint that allows users of Apple Macintosh computers to make overhead transparencies or flip charts. Microsoft is already the leading software supplier for the Macintosh. The personal software industry has been buzzing with acquisitions lately. Microsoft has purchased a employee Berkeley company called Dynamical Systems and has invested in another company, Natural Language Inc.
But the acquisition of Forethought is the first significant one for Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash. Forethought would remain in Sunnyvale, giving Microsoft a Silicon Valley presence. This building featured windows so narrow that they had apparently been designed as arrow slits, through which we could shoot our defensive crossbows against attackers. One hopeful sign in favor of joining Microsoft was that, where other potential acquirors had sent accountants to do due diligence by reading our bank statements and interviewing our bookkeeper, Microsoft instead sent Dave Moore to actually read through the text of all our program source code and to interview our developers.
Fortunately Microsoft turned out to be an excellent fit, and our group remained intact and maintained an amazing degree of organizational independence within Microsoft for as long as that made sense.
After that I volunteered to join the leaders of a European subsidiary team for a crunch project to create and ship a line of networked personal computer and server products, hardware and software, designed for 9 languages. Within 14 months we shipped the first Intel—based personal computers in Europe, based on Microsoft system and application software which was how I came to know Bill Gates.
Based on my experiences traveling around the world for this project and receiving hundreds of presentations from people who used overheads and slides and flipcharts a few made on computers, most not , I began to think about the possibility of a new application to make presentations using the then-undelivered future graphical personal computers such as Macintosh and Windows—the idea which would later be the basis for PowerPoint.
For my first job out of school, I set up a new department at the principal U. Dijkstra, followed by a course of forty-nine lectures from Dijkstra, C. This was a four-week residential course, held on the campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, August, Classes were held in a steeply-raked auditorium with a raised aisle behind every curved row of desks.
It was unnerving when he stopped and lingered behind your chair. While a graduate student, I co-authored with Laura Gould a textbook on programming for linguistic and humanities research , used in courses at Berkeley and Stanford, and in summer sessions for college teachers in the humanities organized by the American Council of Learned Societies.
I did extensive consulting with Berkeley faculty members on the use of computers to study literature, languages, arts, and music.
I was graphics consultant for the Berkeley Campus Computer Center. I spent some years as chief programmer for Berkeley machine translation research Chinese to English. I did the programming of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic fonts and typesetting for the Berkeley Late Egyptian Dictionary. I wrote a program to generate haiku, which was embedded in the idle loop of a campus CDC and became the most prolific poet up till that date, with a selection published in an anthology of computer poetry edited by Richard W.
Bailey Computer Poems, One of my motivations for choosing Berkeley was Professor Bertrand Bronson in the English Department, who had pioneered the study of the traditional tunes of English and Scottish popular ballads by coding the music and transcribing it to punched cards for analysis on tabulating machines; I was able to help him with computer analyses and concordances.
There were many more projects in graphics and music and natural language. I was admitted to the Ph. My wife was admitted to the Linguistics Department for a Ph. I entered with a Special Career Fellowship from the Ford Foundation for five years of complete support. My intention was to specialize in Shakespeare and follow an academic career teaching literature and linguistics, but before I registered for my first classes, I read in the catalogue and discovered classes in the Computer Science Department in the College of Letters and Science, spun off from the Math Department.
My advisor, Josephine Miles, the poet, agreed that some exposure to computers would be broadening, so I enrolled in a beginning programming class. I was immediately enthralled, took more classes CDC assembly language from Butler Lampson was memorable , and soon I formally broadened my program; this was possible because the Special Career Fellowship made me independent of any department. This was a wise step for the purpose of getting an education, but not necessarily wise for the purpose of ever completing the degree.
Pursuing a Ph. The computer scientists thought I was reasonably smart, at least for a student whose interests were in such nebulous areas as analyzing literary language and music.
The literary people thought I was a tolerable critic, at least for a student whose interests were more in linguistic structure of language and in computer analyses.
The linguists thought I had some useful observations, at least for a student whose interests were more in formal languages and literary language than in collecting field data about obscure tribal tongues. Over the next ten years, I passed: —university Ph. But by , after ten years at Berkeley, I had decided I needed to write that dissertation far less than I needed to move to Silicon Valley, where I could get the experience to do a software startup for the new single-user personal computers.
The first Apple ][ had been introduced only a few months before. And just as had been a great year to move to Berkeley, was a great year to move to Silicon Valley. I transferred to the University of Southern California as a junior, and joined the honors program in the English Department. There, one of my major advisors was Professor Virginia Tufte, who was particularly encouraging in helping me to gain admission offers from several leading graduate schools. Her son Edward Tufte, who was about my same age, would later attract a great deal of attention for his important work on presentation of information, and incidentally also for his opinions about PowerPoint.
James W. Fifield, Jr. I re-entered conventional higher education at Los Angeles City College , a large and well-established two-year community college located on what had once been the original campus of UCLA in central Los Angeles, where I studied English literature and was selected to be the editor of the campus literary magazine.
I was expelled from high school for showing disrespect of administrators, a charge that was undeniably true. My beef was that they allowed a poor math teacher to choose a textbook not sophisticated enough for the Honors Mathematics track.
I was happy to be expelled indefinitely, and just dropped out permanently. I never completed high school or any equivalent, never took any equivalency test, and nobody ever cared. My scores on national exams gave me admission to universities anyway, and I tried out two of them for one semester each, but I was interested in studying other things.
I interrupted university for a self-directed three-year program to study libertarian economic theory and history. In that first year, I mostly read in their large library the classic books, which were in those days out of print and hard to find, talked with frequent important visitors to the Foundation, and made occasional field trips to visit individualist luminaries such as Rose Wilder Lane. The second year, I lived in Manhattan and regularly went to listen to the weekly open seminars of Ludwig von Mises at New York University.
So the second year focused on Rothbard and Mises, and on reading classic books that came up in their discussions. In the third year, I attended the Phrontistery, a one-year program in libertarian economics for eighteen students, held at Rampart College in Colorado, where the visiting faculty included a number of scholars from many universities: Milton Friedman, Gordon Tullock, James J.
Harper, Bruno Leoni, G. Warren Nutter, Arthur A. Ekirch, Sylvester Petro, Oscar W. Cooley, and Roger J. The very first public use of a laptop to project video from PowerPoint took place on 25 February , at the Hotel Regina , in the Place des Pyramides, Paris across from the Tuileries. With a laptop casually under my arm, I entered at the back of a ballroom filled with hundreds of Microsoft people from the European, Middle Eastern, and African subsidiaries.
I walked through the audience carrying the laptop, up to a podium at the front; there I opened the laptop, and plugged in a video cable on the lectern.
I began delivering a presentation to introduce PowerPoint 3. No one had ever seen PowerPoint running on a portable computer before, let alone being used to produce a real-time video show in color with animated builds and transitions.
The audience, all Microsoft people who talked to customers frequently, grasped immediately what the future would bring for their own presentations; there was deafening applause. The computer hardware was only barely there. I was using an early-production color notebook computer from Texas Instruments with x color screen and video out, and sufficient CPU to do graphics. We managed to get hold of two such machines in the U.
The unreleased Windows 3. The two machines were hand-carried on separate airplanes to Paris, since no similar machines were available anywhere in Europe.
The entire day Monday 24 February was spent in the ballroom of the Hotel Regina with a staff of local audio-visual consultants installing and trouble-shooting the massive video projector the only kind that then existed. The demo went off without a hitch. Similar demonstrations were given in the U. Windows 3. Video slideshows projected from a laptop computer were initially possible only for presenters in specialized venues using professional equipment, but as new video projectors that were small, bright, and inexpensive gradually became available over the next several years this became the most popular PowerPoint presentation format for everyone, and eventually it displaced traditional overheads and 35mm slides.
Within a few years what had been a unique demo would become a commonplace worldwide in auditoriums and large corporate conference rooms and then would become ubiquitous in small meeting rooms in businesses of all kinds during the tech boom of the late s. The slides I used to demonstrate PowerPoint 3. The Columbus theme was used in all our marketing materials, packaging, and demos worldwide beginning with Forethought PowerPoint 1. The last use of the theme for the — launch of PowerPoint 3.
Columbian half-dollar coins minted for the Columbian Exposition exactly a century earlier in Windows ship and Mac ship. Boettinger New York and London: Macmillan, , frequently reprinted but now out of print. Because Boettinger wrote twenty years before PowerPoint was invented, he focuses on the communication techniques without being distracted by the irrelevant mechanics of any software application. A survey of the state of Desktop Presentation software in This part I, for Macintosh, includes a demo of PowerPoint 2.
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