The creator of PowerPoint died at the age of 76

The Washington Post has reported that Dennis Austin, creator of PowerPoint, has died at his home in Los Altos, California. His son Michael Austin said that his father was suffering from lung cancer and was 76 years old when he died.

Austin studied software engineering at various universities such as MIT and UC Santa Barbara. He then worked with Forethought and developed PowerPoint, which was released in 1987. A few months after the release of this software, Microsoft bought Forethought, and Austin worked as the main developer of PowerPoint from 1985 to 1996, when he retired.

According to the Washington Post, Robert Gaskins, another creator of PowerPoint, wrote in his book Sweating Bullets: “Austin played an important role in the creation of PowerPoint, and if it wasn’t for his ideas, PowerPoint would not have been formed at all and no one would ever hear about it.”

Of course, despite its 36-year history, PowerPoint also had opponents. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said, “We banned PowerPoint at Amazon, and it was the smartest thing we ever did.” Steve Jobs once said, “People who know exactly what they are talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

However, PowerPoint also has its fans, for example David Byrne, the singer of The Talking Heads, has mentioned it as a lovely artistic tool. PowerPoint is now part of the Microsoft Office suite, and Microsoft has recently added several artificial intelligence tools to PowerPoint using the AI ​​assistant Copilot. These tools can generate presentations and images for you or adjust the text format in a presentation.

Source: theverge