20 years of PowerPoint

Today's Wall Street Journal features an article titled PowerPoint turns 20 as its creators ponder a dark side to success. I did a quick poll of the PowerPoint:Mac team here today, and between us, we've got boxed copies of all versions of PowerPoint:Mac. The lead program manager has version 1, I've got version 2, and one of the developers down the hall has everything from version 3 on. Being a geek, I've got versions 1 through 4 installed on one of my machines at home.

For the California edition of the MacBU tenth anniversary party, I brought in a still-functional PowerBook 180, installed version 1, and re-did the old Columbus example presentation as if I were trying to convince Microsoft to continue funding PowerPoint. Okay, so that probably only amused me. Of course, it's nothing like David Byrne's PowerPoint presentations, but I was running on old software and hardware.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 20, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2007
  Wow, I can't believe I got that wrong.  Thanks for pointing it out!

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2008
  The comment has been removed