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Sunday, October 14, 2012

History of MS Powerpoint




MS Powerpoint 

 logo of powerpoint


Bill Gates knows a good thing when he sees it, and in 1987, he monitored the whirlwind of program fruition, purchase, reselling, and marketing of Robert Gaskins’ PowerPoint Presentation. Gaskins, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, created PowerPoint at his own R&D Laboratories, first for an offer by Apple and then for a better Microsoft bid. Apple had slated their “Presentation” to run on the Apple II line of Macintosh with the goal of providing presenters with digitalized slides to accompany their speeches. In a $14 million dollar buyout, Gates brought the program (and Gaskins) to Microsoft, changing “Presentation” to the familiar Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation.
By combining notations, slides, and audio, this office tool, now selling over $100 million annually, would revolutionize the world of presentations. However, it would take 14 years to complete these three basic functions, and Gaskins set to work at the Microsoft Business unit from 1987 to 1993 with the sole intention of managing the growth of PowerPoint.
PowerPoint 1.0 came with an impressive 236 color graphics card and its share of problems, and in the end it wasn’t as attractive as the standard slide projector or over-head monitor. The program allowed users to easily add headings and text to slides, but the digitalizing of photographs was expensive and limited users to large businesses and government.
PowerPoint 2.0 helped curb this problem by providing users with digitalized transfers of their 35mm slides. Customers could send their photographs and graphics to the partnering company Genigraphics and have their PowerPoint slides processed in over 16 million colors overnight. This update was first introduced for Macs in 1988 and for Windows in 1990 and sold a myriad more than its 17 competitors.
But it was PowerPoint 3.0 that brought the program's three fundamental functions of photograph, notation, and audio presentation together. Released for both Windows and Mac in 1992, Microsoft PowerPoint 3.0 included options to output live video, supported synchronize sound and video clips, animations, and added slide transition graphics, and animations. With a full sense of completion, Robert Gaskins left his position at Microsoft in 1993 to restore a historic mansion with his wife in London.
PowerPoint would go through four more phases after Gaskins' departure, each increasing the revenues of the now standard program. In the mid-1990s, PowerPoint was packaged with the popular Excel and Word as the three-for-one Microsoft Office, which provided business users with the full bundle of Microsoft’s largest selling office programs for a reduced price. The Internet brought HTML to PowerPoint 97, and users were given the ability to save their presentations as web files. As online communications grew, PowerPoint 2000 continued this tradition by adding video conferencing and presenter videos. So, have fun with MS Powerpoint............................


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