Now there’s a target for that time travel murder trope…
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The devil crapped it out in a particular awful case of hell chili induced diarrhea?
Huh, I always thought it was Satan. It wasn’t Satan? Learn something every day.
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Microsoft Word and Excel were also developed first on the Apple Macintosh. As were most ‘graphic’ applications and file formats we are familiar with today. (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat/PDF…) Even fonts made their appearance on the platform first.
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If you could go back in time and shoot Hitler before he got into power, would you? But what if the consequences were someone worse…
From talking to those older than myself who worked in large corporations this was effectively a big a deal as word processing or spreadsheets in that it cut so much time and red tape off the basics of doing business.
We can piss and moan about PPT now, often with good reason, because it is generally used so poorly. At my last employer lots of stuff that would have been better done as documents were required to be done in PPT. But when used well, PPT is still a pretty great tool.
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I have no particular objection to PowerPoint as a presentation tool. I mean, it has a number of annoying and useless bells and whistles (random slide transitions, anyone?), but you don’t have to use them.
Where its corrosive, indeed cancerous, effect comes in is its use as a documentation format. Wodges of text are stuffed into slides that are often never intended to be presented to an audience, only skimmed by people sitting at their desks so they can have the illusion of understanding the matter at hand.
Edward Tufte blamed PowerPoint for, among other things, the Columbia disaster, in “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”.
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If I had to guess I’d say white on blue was a hangover from WordPerfect. That’s just how text on a PC looked for an awful lot of people in those days.
Blue on black? That’s just a subliminal wish to kill everyone via powerpoint.
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In The Jennifer Morgue by Charlie Stross there’s a knee-slapping send-up of PowerPoint where it’s basically worse than death. Possibly the funniest scene Stross has ever written.
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Great essay.
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Yep. But not enough my colleagues have read it. I guess I’ll have to condense it into a PowerPoint presentation.
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For an interesting notion of similarity on one of the other ‘historical inflection points’, the JFK assassination, read Stephen King’s “11/22/63.”
Also, obligatory superlative: PPT Gettysburg Address.
Was Forethought really such a pioneer? I remember using Slidewrite Plus and Harvard Graphics on DOS PCs around 1987/1988, and both were on version 2 by that time. If Forethought was the first to market, it couldn’t have been by much.
Yes, Wikipedia says that Harvard Graphics launched in 1986, and I’ve found a review of Slidewrite 2.1 in April 1988:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6D4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA44#v=onepage&q&f=false
As joelfinkle comments above, both were somewhat oriented towards charts and graphs, but I can certainly remember making PowerPoint-like lists of text as well.
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But I bet you could do it in Scratch.
Well, I guess one could simply travel back in time and offer him a well-paid job as an artist.
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Having used some of the DOS tools myself where combining words and images required much more labor I figure so.
In a previous job at a graphic design agency, I once spent weeks working on a PowerPoint for a certain large corporation to use for B2B pitch meetings. I don’t know why they outsourced this work, as every halfway-creative idea we had was shot down. After several arduous rounds of revisions (as tends to happen when the initial provided content is years out of date and the final product has to go through three departments for review), I asked the account manager what the total cost of our hours on the project so far had been. She estimated that they’d be paying close to $10,000 for that damn presentation.
The more things change, etc.
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I heard a good one from my boss the other day. He pitched for some biz, was asked to review the competitor’s >700 slide PowerPoint deck, said no, typed up two pages of ppt, and won the business.
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