I love these first hand accounts from the 80s.<p>My very small related story is in '89 I was in Dallas and got a contracting gig from Aldus to work on Persuasion (Aldus' competitor to PowerPoint) for the Mac. I showed up for my first day, but the guy I was supposed to work for wasn't there yet so the office manager got me a desk and a notepad and IT came and made sure the Mac on my desk was properly connected to the network. After an hour or two of twiddling my thumbs and trying to look like I was doing something productive, my boss came in to say "oh. looks like a lot of us were laid off today and we're canceling your contract."<p>The Aldus guys were reasonable about it and gave me 2 weeks severance just for holding down the chair for two hours.<p>It has to be the shortest professional gig I've ever had.
Persuasion was better than Powerpoint in every way; but even when Adobe bought it from Aldus, it could not compete with "free" i.e. PP being part of Office, and did not last long in the 90's. Office also basically killed word processing innovation and spreadsheet innovation for a long time.<p>Today almost no one remembers any of these types of apps that existed before Office. I remember since I was involved in several of them.
If you really want to read more than you ever wanted to know about the history of powerpoint, Robert Gaskins - one of the creators - wrote a whole book of the history [0] and has a detailed web site with tons more details [1].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.robertgaskins.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.robertgaskins.com</a>
A world where Apple had acquired PowerPoint in 1987 could have hurt Apple's own HyperCard, which was also released in 1987. HyperCard did have its moment of success from its release in 1987 to roughly the mid-1990s.<p>Back on our timeline where Microsoft acquired PowerPoint, HyperCard could have been a strong competitor to PowerPoint well into the 2000s had (1) Apple gave HyperCard's development more love, (2) Apple authorized a port to Windows during the Windows 3.1 era, and (3) Apple developed functionality to convert HyperCard stacks to Web applications and released this around 1995 or 1996.
> Key personnel, to be named (but certainly including all the senior developers and me), would be required to agree to relocate to Redmond as a condition of the deal.<p>That's <i>horrible.</i> I've moved quite a few times for my spouse, and the last one was extremely painful. (I made her promise that it was the last time she asks to move for career reasons.)<p>Many of us are in two-career relationships. We have children and families. Casually expecting that we can move on the drop of a hat is short-sighted, and a good way to make an acquisition fail.
The article year is kind of confusing on this one, it made me go "that can't be right, Microsoft owned PowerPoint before then... didn't it?"
> There is a lot of convoluted bit shifting that occurs in order to get the address and data from a Game Genie. This is probably to make the Game Genie codes seem more magical. After all, given 2 Game Genie codes, one that granted 5 lives on startup and another code that granted 9 lives, and the only difference between the 2 codes was one character, even a novice player could probably figure out that modifying that one character to any of the acceptable letter characters would grant between 1 and 16 lives on startup.<p>Why would they want to intentionally obfuscate it though? Doesn't it just add more value to their product if people are able to reverse-engineer codes and come up with better stuff?<p>Or maybe the real reason to randomize things more is because it creates more potential for diversity in the effects of codes? e.g. instead of a code that gives you 5 lives and a one-character-different code that gives you 9 lives, by randomizing things the first code gives you 5 lives and the second code makes you fly<p>Assuming I'm understanding things correctly
I was curious what PowerPoint looked like in 1987 and found this video of someone exploring a sample presentation that came with it: <a href="https://vimeo.com/181999729" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/181999729</a>
Keynote was one of the eye-opening moments for me when switching from Win to Mac, and one of the big reasons I am committed to staying in Apple’s ecosystem.
This sounds like a stereotype, but I use Beamer whenever I can.<p>Otherwise: I don't use Emacs (I actually do Beamer in Overleaf, the easy-o online latex editor), can write regexes but don't have a clue of what awk does, use Notion and the Google calendar thing instead of text tools and write my todo.txt in pen in my wrist (or did when I worked in an office and could conceal it with business button-down shirts).<p>But Beamer, oh la la.
The article is interesting in the part of buying PowerPoint.<p>But what happened with the other "big" product mentioned briefly in the article: "FileMaker Plus"? Does that mean that some people stayed with the "old" company and then got later acquired by Apple? Because AFAIK, FileMaker these days is a subsidiary of Apple.
FTA:
> It was the first significant acquisition made by Microsoft.<p>Nope! That honor goes to 86-DOS 1.10, acquired by Microsoft for $75K in July 1981.