📚 Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint

Finished reading Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins. I’m a big fan of dissections of all things pop, and although the topic of this book isn’t quite the same as a music documentary or a look back at 1980s UK TV programmes, the backstory of PowerPoint is in the same wheelhouse for me. It’s played a big role in my life and feels like a part of mainstream culture. The book scratched exactly the same itch. The author was hired by Forethought, Inc. in 1984 as Vice President of Product Development, a year after the company was founded. The company had investors but little direction, and needed a reboot. Gaskins brought into the company his idea of developing a tool for creating both overhead transparencies and 35mm slides for the nascent GUI-based desktop computer platforms, Macintosh, Windows and OS/2, some of which hadn’t been released yet. His view was that commodity personal computers would get better over time and that these GUI-based platforms would…