The former chief developer of PowerPoint graphics presentation software, Dennis Austin, died after a long illness on January 1er September, at the age of 76.
Thirty-six years after its creation, PowerPoint remains widely used in businesses, particularly to produce visual aids for meetings or training. This software inspired similar presentation programs released years later, such as the much more recent Impress or Keynote.
PowerPoint was not born within Microsoft, but in the research and development offices of Forethought Inc., a company founded in 1983 in Silicon Valley. The software, marketed in 1987, will be purchased some months later by Microsoft.
The initial idea for PowerPoint came from Robert Gaskins, Forethought’s head of development. But in his work Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint (2012, unpublished in French), the latter recognizes Dennis Austin’s paternity “at least half of the main design ideas. [Il est] solely responsible for its smooth performance and impeccable rendering”. Robert Gaskins considers it likely that in the absence of Dennis Austin, no one would ever have heard of PowerPoint.
According to Washington Post, the role of the engineer was to make this software easy to use: the interface had to make it easy to slide a few small drawings, graphics, and texts calibrated in a precise font into a presentation. The user had to be able to view their pages exactly as they would appear on the presentation screen, or on other people’s computers.
In a never published work, signed Dennis Austin and cited by the Washington Postthe engineer explained that “Our users were comfortable with computers, but probably not with graphics software. They were very motivated to present the best they could in front of their colleagues, but they were not good at graphic design.”
After the software was purchased by Microsoft, Dennis Austin continued to lead its development for nine years, before retiring in 1996, at the age of 49.