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Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation application designed by Forethought, Inc.’s Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin. It was first published on April 20, 1987, and was designed only for Macintosh System Operating System computers. Three months after its release, Microsoft paid $14 million for PowerPoint. This was Microsoft’s first significant acquisition, and the company established a new PowerPoint business unit in Silicon Valley, where Forethought was based.

PowerPoint was included in the Microsoft Office suite, which was initially released in 1989 for Macintosh and 1990 for Windows and had several Microsoft applications. PowerPoint was incorporated into Microsoft Office development, beginning with version 4.0 (1994), and shared common components and a converged user interface were implemented.

Before introducing a version for Microsoft Windows, PowerPoint’s market share was relatively tiny, but it increased significantly as Windows and Office grew.

(pp402–404) Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint has had a 95 percent dominance of the global presentation software industry.

PowerPoint was created to offer graphics for group presentations within businesses. Still, it has since become highly popular in various communication scenarios, both in and out of the workplace. The influence of this much broader usage of PowerPoint has been seen as a significant change throughout society, with strong reactions such as suggestions that it should be used less, differently, or better.

The original version of PowerPoint (Macintosh 1987) was used to create overhead transparencies, whereas the second version (Macintosh 1988, Windows 1990) could also create color 35 mm slides. The third edition (Windows and Macintosh 1992) offered virtual slideshow video output to digital projectors, eventually replacing actual transparencies and slides.

Since then, a dozen major editions have brought a slew of new features and modes of operation and made PowerPoint available on platforms other than Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, including versions for iOS, Android, and online access.

Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin of Forethought, Inc., a Silicon Valley software firm, invented PowerPoint. Forethought was formed in 1983 to develop an integrated environment and programs for future personal computers with a graphical user interface. Still, it ran into problems, necessitating a “restart” and a new strategy.

Forethought appointed Robert Gaskins as vice president of product development(p51) on July 5, 1984, to design a new program that would be especially suited to the new graphical personal computers, such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. A month later, on August 14, 1984, Gaskins published his first description of PowerPoint in the form of a 2-page paper titled “Presentation Graphics for Overhead Projection.” Dennis Austin was chosen as the PowerPoint developer by Gaskins in October 1984.

For over a year, Gaskins and Austin collaborated on the concept and design of the new product, producing the first specification sheet on August 21, 1985. This initial design paper depicted a product in Microsoft Windows 1.0, which had not yet been published at the time.

Austin began working on the spec in November 1985, initially for the Macintosh.

(p104) Six months later, on May 1, 1986, Gaskins and Austin picked Thomas Rudkin as the project’s second developer. (p149) In June 1986, Gaskins completed two final product specification marketing documents, one for Macintosh and the other for Windows. Around the same time, Austin, Rudkin, and Gaskins released their second and last major design specification paper, this time with a Macintosh appearance.

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