Patented: History of Inventions

PowerPoint

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Episode notes

We take PowerPoint for granted. It's as much a fact of life as concrete. Or rainy afternoons. But it hasn’t always been here. It has a story. And once you’ve heard it, you’ll never look at PowerPoint the same way again.

Those old enough can remember the world before PowerPoint. A world where presentations were done on overhead projectors or 35mm slideshow carousels. In 1985, in the US alone, people made over 600 million 35mm slides and more than 500 million overhead transparencies. Large companies had departments dedicated to producing them.

Robert Gaskins, the inventor of PowerPoint, had a vision of how computers could produce these slides and transparencies more efficiently, and eventually consign them to the dustbin of history.

Russell Davies is our guest today and author of Everything I Know about Life I Learned from PowerPoint. He’s here to tell us that the inventor of PowerPoint, Robert Gaskins, is the tech hero we should all have.

Produced by Freddy Chick

Edited by Anisha Deva

Executive Producer was Charlotte Long

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