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, reworking 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 might level, click on and rearrange data with a mouse. “Our customers have been accustomed to computer systems, however in all probability 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 Austin wrote in an unpublished historical past of the software program’s improvement.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 greatest in entrance of others, however they weren’t savvy in graphics design.”
Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought govt who conceived the software program, it was Mr. Austin’s job because the software program engineer to make PowerPoint (initially referred to as Presenter) simple to function. He achieved this with a “direct-manipulation interface,” he wrote, which means that “what you might be modifying seems to be 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 might be uniform with graphic borders, company logos and slide numbers. The purpose, Mr. Austin wrote, was “to create shows — not merely slides.”
In his ebook “Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint” (2012), Gaskins wrote that “Dennis got here up with no less than half of the foremost design concepts,” and was “fully answerable 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.”
