Dennis Austin, the principal software program developer of PowerPoint, handed away from lung most cancers on Sept. 1. He was 76. The Washington Put up reviews: Launched in 1987 by Forethought, a small software program agency, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, remodeling the labor-intensive course of of making slides — a activity usually assigned to design departments or outsourced — to 1 the place any worker with a pc may level, click on and rearrange info with a mouse. “Our customers have been conversant in computer systems, however most likely not graphics software program,” Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished historical past of the software program’s improvement. “They have been extremely motivated to look their finest in entrance of others, however they weren’t savvy in graphics design.”
Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought government who conceived the software program, it was Mr. Austin’s job because the software program engineer to make PowerPoint (initially known as Presenter) straightforward to function. He achieved this with a “direct-manipulation interface,” he wrote, that means that “what you’re modifying seems precisely like the ultimate product.” Initially focused for Macintosh computer systems, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included methods for customers to include graphics, clip artwork and a number of fonts. As well as, the slides may very well be uniform with graphic borders, company logos and slide numbers. The purpose, Mr. Austin wrote, was “to create displays — not merely slides.”
In his ebook “Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint” (2012), Gaskins wrote that “Dennis got here up with at the least half of the main design concepts,” and was “utterly liable for the fluid efficiency and the polished end of the implementation.” “It is a good guess,” Gaskins added, “that if Dennis had not been the individual designing PowerPoint, nobody would ever have heard of it.”
