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Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
- h2odragon 3y ago+ did his job well + helped many communicate + made it easier to miscommunication thereby; Summary: tying manager types into harmless video games was probably a net win for the world
- orionblastar 3y agoI remember we used Harvard Graphics for DOS before we used PowerPoint.
- gardenhedge 3y agoPowerPoint.. Well it was Denis or someone but unfortunately we haven't grown to something better yet
- netfl0 3y agoAdvance. May his memory be eternal.
- Simulacra 3y agoWill there be a PowerPoint presentation at his memorial service?
- gizajob 3y agoIf they can get the projector working.
- mysterydip 3y agoHopefully with all the text on the slides, which someone then reads verbatim out loud.
- sokoloff 3y agoBut only after verbalizing that they won’t “read all of that to you”
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoDennis Austin o Born o Developed PowerPoint o Died
- delish 3y agohttps://archive.ph/y77f8 https://archive.ph/y77f8
- replygirl 3y agomissed an opportunity to format the article as slides
- nickpeterson 3y agopowerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.
- glandium 3y agoI don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).
- dalai 3y agoI think I remember using an inkjet printer for that. If I remember correctly, the sheets had a white margin on one of short edges.
- wanderingstan 3y agoIn my school, there was a copier that’s could copy onto a transparency. Also, early laser printer ads would promote that they could print onto transparencies. My HS teacher had elaborate combinations of transparencies that he would layer on top of each other. The upper layers containing hand-drawn marker annotations.
- tgv 3y agoBit older. For my first presentations, I drew on them with markers. I've still got one where I inserted a Snoopy cartoon by hand. But later, you could photocopy them, or put them in a laser printer (assuming you had one).
- baz00 3y agoI still do a "virtual" version of this with GoodNotes on an iPad and Zoom. It feels better than using Powerpoint.
- ghaff 3y agoThey were often just typed/handwritten and copied onto transparencies for internal/academic stuff. It was also pretty common to use HP pen plotters for quite a while when I was working in the late 80s/90s. We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get changes made once the slide was created.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated video from years ago, an interview with the Computer History Museum: Oral History of Dennis R. Austin, 2015 https://youtu.be/DgNIHXEHTTs?si=bQdAlW3bteVH7xvL https://youtu.be/DgNIHXEHTTs?si=bQdAlW3bteVH7xvL
- shrubble 3y agoPowerPoint wasn't the first though, was it? I remember Harvard Graphics and something from Lotus also?
- largbae 3y agoAnd HyperCard!
- dreamcompiler 3y agoAldus Persuasion was far superior to Powerpoint. Sadly it got bought and killed.
- shrubble 3y agoAdobe should never have been allowed to buy them, there had been an anti-trust decree which was later removed...
- ghaff 3y agoThere was quite the profusion of office productivity software at one point, some of which had approaches that I preferred (at least for some purposes) to those that ended up being enshrined in the Microsoft suite. One of the things I like about Google Workplace is it ended up stripping out a lot of the sort of cruft that Microsoft added over the years and ended up with components that are more streamlined for my generally fairly simple needs.
- bonzini 3y agoYes, Lotus Freelance. Also IBM Storyboard. Not sure which of those had vector graphics in the same style as modern PowerPoint (Storyboard was bitmapped), and whether old PowerPoint already had vector graphics.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- james-bcn 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tedchs 3y agoI hope his funeral has a slide presentation with some amazing animations and sound effects! :)
- simonh 3y agoYou should see his marriage proposal. Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual message in an attached powerpoint.
- hermitcrab 3y agoSome people don't understand that you can attach just an image file to an email. I often get Word attachments containing a single image.
- madphilosopher 3y agoIf you ran a carpentry shop, you wouldn't retain employees who lacked a basic understanding of their woodworking tools and how to use them. Yet we tolerate this of "information workers" the world over. Why is that? Is it because the image got to you after all, so it doesn't really matter how inefficient the process was? I am genuinely curious. But then again, I ask the question as a computer enthusiast using a computer to talk to other computer enthusiasts about computers.
- hermitcrab 3y agoIf you sell B2C software you are going to end up with customers with a very wide range of computer skills, from professional IT person to someone who can barely find the computer 'on' button. You just have to deal with it. See also: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/24/10-things-non-technical-users-dont-understand-about-your-software/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/08/24/10-things-non-tech...
- pcchristie 3y agoI once had a client become nervous about sending me a screenshot of (slightly) sensitive data. Despite explaining the NDAs, I could only get her to send a redacted version, which was fine given none of the sensitive parts of data was relevant to what I wanted to know. She took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot in to an XLSX, and put a "Shape" over the top of the part of the screenshot that she wanted to redact. Then sent me the XLSX in an email. Tangential to your comment but it reminded me.
- FFP999 3y agoNext time you have a presentation to write, try using LaTeX with the Beamer module instead of a WYSIWYG editor. I wouldn't ever go back, myself.
- galoisscobi 3y agoA strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides. Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no. Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
- scarface_74 3y agoI don’t see an issue with this. I had a very technical CTO at my n-2 job who was in his 50s and would often write POCs himself in C# or Python as research. When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries. But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a very high level overview and doesn’t want the details. I’m working with him now on a side contract. He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and Quicksite reports. He does that when he is “tired of dealing with product managers and all of this scrum shit”.
- ssscool 3y ago[dead]
- safety1st 3y agoSounds like an amazing guy to work with.
- scarface_74 3y agoThe rest of the story was that he was hired at a startup that was founded by two non technical brothers. The brothers got funding and hired a consulting company to build the MVP and find product market fit. They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove their dependence on the consulting company. I was his second technical hire. He wanted to make everything “cloud native” for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to micro services to large health care providers. We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it out. Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and people were hammering our services, they didn’t miss a beat. After I basically “put myself out of a job” and had done everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department. Three years later, the company we worked for had had an exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I called him up and we talked about some problem he was having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation. It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting contract on my last day at AWS. FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later. I don’t see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he originally gave me to lead his “transformation” vision. He knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.
- ggambetta 3y agoHe's moved on to the next slide, please.
- ftxbro 3y agoi'm guessing hacker news won't put the black bar EDIT: i'm not roasting a dead person you guys. anyway i feel like if people hate a tool it's sometimes because the tool is so good that it gets abused for every other purpose and some of those purposes aren't a good fit, it's not because the tool was bad it's the opposite.
- Maro 3y agoI work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around. What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool: • something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates • .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had some lesser minions also think about it and prepare a PPT • .. further, if you put it in a PPT, that means you're serious about your position --- it signals commitment • .. and finally, a PPT shows that you know how to play the game, you're not some tech weirdo that thinks PPTs are irrelevant PPTs are a cultural currency in Corporates.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- WanderPanda 3y agoAs a tech weirdo I still think PPTs are the best way to convey concepts. You can mix bullet points with images and video and have everything be progressively revealed exactly when you explain it. I can‘t even think of an alternative to this other than adhoc whiteboard drawings which can‘t match PPTs on any axis except if you‘re just (collaboratively) developing an idea/concept
- blululu 3y agoVideo is usually more effective for asynchronous presentations. Powerpoint is great for spoken presentations where everyone is in the same room. But they generally suck as summary reports. For thinking and analysis word docs are superior. For asynchronous presentation video is superior. Video allows you to control the timing and framing in a way that a slide deck cannot. The main downside to videos is that they are harder to make. But there is a reason people prefer science documentaries over recorded lectures or lecture slides.
- smfugit 3y agoBooks beat them all imho :)
- p5a0u9l 3y agoOne aspect of Amazon culture I’ve enjoyed is that meetings are document driven, and PPTs are rare, even non existent. Meetings start with dedicated reading time. It feels like PPT engendered this false sense of communication by making it easier to bullet-ize and visualize. PPT in practice lowers the critical thinking required of presenters and presentees.
- joegahona 3y agoI've never worked at Amazon, but this is something I really envy about my friends who do. I love a well-written, concise document, but the large enterprise I work at now is in love with Google Slides. I can't stand them.
- F-W-M 3y agoWhy do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like: "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?". I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It just is very far from what I know.
- lol768 3y agoI've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a satisfactory answer. It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace for folks to not manage their time effectively to get prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre approach.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"Quite a bizarre approach." Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand. And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most topics I think. Better than people pretending they know what is going on.
- lemper 3y ago[flagged]
- ETH_start 3y agoEvery death is an utter tragedy. We should collectively work to end biological mortality.
- davidw 3y agoDennis Austin dies at 76. * Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of Virginia * Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create PowerPoint * Forethought acquired by Microsoft * By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales * Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes > Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought they were unfairly aimed at the software and not the people who were using it to make lazy, poor presentations. > “It’s just like the printing press,” Mr. Austin told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.”
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoRobert Gaskins wrote an interesting book on the development of Powerpoint and the collaboration with Apple and Microsoft.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CharlesW 3y agoThank you for making a proper slide for this. (Suggestion: Remove "." from slide title.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wredue 3y ago>thought they were unfairly aimed at the software Yeah. I’ll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess. The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is the enormity of the task to disrupt it.
- no_wizard 3y agoI surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in a very real ways. For the last 3 places I’ve worked everything is done in Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold over is with Excel, that’s all anyone used from MS
- darreninthenet 3y agoI heard he was shot several times... ... died of too many bullet points (I'll see myself out)
- fuzztester 3y agoYes, just slide out and fade away. Don't transition back either :)
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoI demand the black ribbon!
- dredmorbius 3y agoI've suggested a dark bullet in this specific instance.
- vector_spaces 3y agoI use Google Slides as a lightweight notetaking format at work. This works great for me because it's super flexible, and has the added benefit that I can easily convert my notes to actual presentable slides during standups or other meetings. Usually these aren't actual polished slides such that you'd see in a corporate presentation, but talking points to keep meetings more focused and productive.
- WoodenChair 3y agoIf you want to read about the development of PowerPoint by its visionary, you can checkout the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins: https://amzn.to/3PvTvF0 https://amzn.to/3PvTvF0 Dennis Austin was the lead developer and Gaskins was the idea guy/manager.
- canucker2016 3y agoRobert Gaskins, co-creator of PowerPoint, has a personal website with info about PowerPoint: https://www.robertgaskins.com/ https://www.robertgaskins.com/ One can also download the "Sweating Bullets..." book in PDF form for free from his website (listed in the PowerPoint History section on the main page of his website): https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
- throy930493 3y ago"Sweating Bullets", "Almost Perfect" (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ http://www.wordplace.com/ap/), "The Autodesk File" (https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/ https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/) and "Show Stopper!" were a few books that I think pair very well, and as a developer who wasn't around in the time really gave interesting and comparable insights into the development of a few really important companies and pieces of software.
- canucker2016 3y agoFor Visicalc, Dan Bricklin has a few blog posts: http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-tate https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-ta...
- pmcjones 3y ago[dupe]
- inSenCite 3y agoTruly a sad day for consulting. The entire industry runs on PPT.
- pmcjones 3y agoDennis and I overlapped at Tandem Computers in the early 1980s, but we didn't meet until 2003, when we were both members of a small private club of computer geezers. In addition to being a great software designer he was one of the nicest and most thoughtful people I've ever met.
- aswanson 3y agoComputer Geezers would make an awesome band name.
- pmcjones 3y agoAlmost as good as Severe Tire Damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_Tire_Damage_(band) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_Tire_Damage_(band)
- irrational 3y agoExcept the name’s acronym is already taken.
- pottertheotter 3y agoMy dad worked at Tandem in the 1980s. I remember going and visiting him at work and the huge tape memory. And the swimming pool at the office in Cupertino.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoPowerPoint is where I first understood the concept of image editing as a kid - dragging and dropping. And clip art was before it’s time - imagine how much people would love that exact same thing copypasted onto a reel or a TikTok. RIP Dennis.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoLet's all remember that correlation is not causation. Although we all know it was dangerous to work with a toxic product for so long.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoRIP - what an impact though. i wonder if they’ll have a PowerPoint slides at the memorial, if it was me, i would have told my loved ones to do that.
- 3seashells 3y ago[flagged]
- nenadg 3y agoPeople hating PowerPoint should really try hating invention of gunpowder first then Edison burning down elephants with electrical current.
- enraged_camel 3y agoThanks for the informative comment.
- revskill 3y agoWhat's best library to create powerpoint on the web nowadays ?
- hungryforcodes 3y agoEveryone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not "Prepare a power point".
- foooorsyth 3y agoNice anecdote. Microsoft 365 has triple the market share of GSuite. The world still runs on Excel and PowerPoint.
- hungryforcodes 3y agoIn which countries...
- foooorsyth 3y agoThe rich ones. All of Wall Street runs on Excel. All of management consulting runs on PowerPoint. Private equity runs on both.
- prmoustache 3y agoPossibly. Yet I never used PowerPoint.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? I don't know anyone using Google Slides (never knew that even existed). So I guess not everyone.
- sshah1983 3y agoI’ll never forget the grade 9 science class Powerpoint presentation I did in 1998. I had each letter of every headline flying in one by one with a laser sound (pew pew pew). That was my first moment of magic with Powerpoint.
- placesalt 3y agoI got an attaboy when I used sounds and flying text in my first summer office job. It was cool.
- __rito__ 3y agoI actually created a two part acrion-animation movie lasting ~10 minutes when I was in 8th grade. It had tanks, helicopters, and ammunitions flying. All with sound. It took me an embarrassingly long time to make. Also got a graphic designer neighbor to do a title for my "movie" in AfterEffects.
- astrange 3y agoIf you used WordArt in your titles, that was an intern project by Scott Forstall who later created iOS.
- globalise83 3y agoApart from being useful for presentations, Powerpoint is still my go-to for mockups - screw Figma, I can achieve 80% of the result in 20% of the time.
- placesalt 3y agoThe geometry available and the frankly very subtly good alignment-snapping that it has makes it very useful. Posters, ERDs, I'm sure there are other applications too.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI remember being a bit taken aback when a colleague of mine at a large company where design is a pretty big deal showed me some really good wireframes and told me that he made them in PowerPoint. It’s actually quite a good tool for wireframing
- wholinator2 3y agoI had to make an academic poster in PowerPoint and it was the single worst experience of my academic career. The program just didn't work. I got a ways into it, saved and closed my work, and opened it the next day. Upon opening, no longer could i zoom or scroll or really do anything without the view freezing. I could see the scrollwheel on the side moving but nothing on screen would change. It would stay permanently in this state until i closed it out or (thank God) entered and exited presentation mode, which took seconds to load every time. Eventually it's crass refusal to do anything even mildly useful taught me the exact set of eggshells to walk on to have a somewhat usable program but the damn thing just wouldn't work. I tried everything, including uninstalling and reinstalling the entire office suite. Nothing changed. My poster was not complicated and my laptop was school issued and more than capable of running a single PowerPoint slide. I know this is a post of a man's passing. The PowerPoint he built worked. I remember PowerPoint as a usable and fun slide making tool that was usually the highlight of relatively tedious school projects. To see the bug ridden landfill of "BI" "features" it is now is sad. I genuinely spent a day trying to download an old version that wasn't running 3 "ai" processes in the background. It was a simply disgusting experience and i will never use it again.
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago[dead]
- hansoolo 3y agoWhat I always wondered: is PPT = PowerPoinT or PowerPointPresenTation?
- meej 3y agoWhen I got a job in academia and was faced with creating my first conference poster, I was amazed to discover PowerPoint is the customary software for creating them. It does a pretty good job, too.
- tiffanyg 3y agoPowerPoint is an impressively mixed bag. Something of an extreme example, in my mind, of the "amorality" of tools and, yet, the strongly "good" / "bad" that can come of them. PowerPoint, for all its putative and/or quite real flaws and bad ... points ... is, in some sense, one of the most powerful tools in the modern world. How many decisions have hinged on PowerPoint presentations? How many decisions might have been subtly affected by aspects of the design and implementation of PowerPoint (over versions / time)? ... It's absolutely been hugely useful at times, and, also, seemingly a preview for some Dante-style "ring of hell". In any case, I salute Mr. Austin, offer my condolences to friends and family*, and ... well, I was going to point to a comedic take on PowerPoint that I love but it doesn't fit w/ this news, so, simply: R.I.P. Mr. Austin. * Seriously, not just as a matter of form - I have used it for years through good and bad. I definitely feel some connection, though marginal comparatively.
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago> The Rolling Stones told The New York Times: "the surprise opening act by Severe Tire Damage was a good reminder of the democratic nature of the Internet." God, I miss the old internet, when you could say something like that and actually mean it.