= Forethought PowerPoint =
In April of 1987, a startup called Forethought released a presentation program for the Macintosh called “PowerPoint”[1]. Three months later, this product was acquired by Microsoft. Interestingly, it took two full years before Microsoft released a version of PowerPoint for their own operating system!
|!2 Early History of PowerPoint[1] |
| 1987, April | PowerPoint 1.0 (Mac) |
| 1987, July | Microsoft acquires Forethought |
| 1988, May | PowerPoint 2.0 (Mac) |
| 1990, May | PowerPoint 2.0 (Windows) |
You can read much more about the early days of PowerPoint from the personal home page of [http://www.robertgaskins.com/#powerpoint-history Robert Gaskins], the creator of PowerPoint or from his book,
Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint, available from [http://www.vinlandbooks.com Vinland Books]
# Originally, PowerPoint was called Presenter, but it was renamed to Forethought PowerPoint for trademark reasons[2]
# Microsoft acquired Forethought for $14 million. The original PowerPoint team joined Microsoft to form Microsoft's new Graphics Business Unit[2].
== Try out an early version of Forethought PowerPoint ==
{
"icons" : [
["Boot Disk", "boot-hd", "/disks/mac-marcio's-boot-1.0.qed"],
["Forethought PowerPoint", "floppy", "/disks/mac-powerpoint-1.0.image"],
["Robert Gaskins' Web Page", "hyperlink", "http://www.robertgaskins.com"]
]
}
=== See also: ===
* [[Hypercard vs. Powerpoint]]
* [[Historic Software]]
== References ==
# http://www.robertgaskins.com/#powerpoint-history
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerpoint
Hypercard vs. Powerpoint
Historic Software