PowerPoint is on more than 1 billion computers worldwide

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 18:48:53 -0400

"The Hotel Regina is an Art Nouveau marvel overlooking the Tuileries Garden and the Louvre. But on this day in 1992, its Old World meeting rooms have been retrofitted with advanced video technology. The color projector in the back of the room, the size of a small refrigerator, cost upwards of $100,000 and takes an hour to warm up. A team of technicians has spent the better part of the last 48 hours troubleshooting to ensure that nothing goes wrong when Robert Gaskins, the fastidious architect of a new piece of software called PowerPoint 3.0, walks into the room. He'll be carrying a laptop under his arm, and when he reaches the lectern, he'll pick up a video cable, plug it in, and demonstrate for the first time something that has been reproduced billions of times since: a video presentation, running straight off a laptop, in full color. The audience, full of Microsoft associates from across Europe, will go bananas. They "grasped immediately what the future would bring for their own presentations," Gaskins later wrote. "There was deafening applause.""