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Comment by nickpeterson | Hacker News Reader

powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

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> PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.

Probably not. The fact that making presentations got easier just caused many more (often unnecessary) presentations in my experience.

So at the end of the day, people spend the same amount of work without getting more results.

Going back many many decades my experience is that people were at least almost as bad about reading documents as they are today. The fact that people used overhead projectors and transparencies didn't change the fact that I spent a great deal of my time in meetings with slides.

Right. People didn’t assemble a presentation deck back then, just to mail it to someone for them to look at on their own.

It’s also taken the place of the business letter and some other formerly-common office document formats. I’m not convinced it’s saving time, just creating more junk. Which is how I feel about a lot of application of tech, actually—I suspect huge productivity gains in some narrow cases mask that most tech use is somewhere between a lot worse and only slightly better than whatever it replaced.

Indeed. Apparently even Powerpoint started out there. From Wikipedia: “The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh 1987) was used to produce overhead transparencies, the second (Macintosh 1988, Windows 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides.”

Apple invested in the company (Forethought, Inc) before Microsoft aquired it in 1987.

I don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).

I think I remember using an inkjet printer for that. If I remember correctly, the sheets had a white margin on one of short edges.

In my school, there was a copier that’s could copy onto a transparency. Also, early laser printer ads would promote that they could print onto transparencies.

My HS teacher had elaborate combinations of transparencies that he would layer on top of each other. The upper layers containing hand-drawn marker annotations.

Bit older. For my first presentations, I drew on them with markers. I've still got one where I inserted a Snoopy cartoon by hand. But later, you could photocopy them, or put them in a laser printer (assuming you had one).

I still do a "virtual" version of this with GoodNotes on an iPad and Zoom.

It feels better than using Powerpoint.

They were often just typed/handwritten and copied onto transparencies for internal/academic stuff. It was also pretty common to use HP pen plotters for quite a while when I was working in the late 80s/90s.

We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get changes made once the slide was created.

> old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector

I’m in my early thirties and we sometimes used transparent sheets on overhead projector too when I was in school. Although in our case we made the sheets with the computer (Microsoft Word, Paint, etc) and they gave us transparent sheets that we put in the printer. I remember that the ink on the transparent sheets would smudge if we touched it, which sometimes accidentally happened when we handled our transparent sheets.

Even in high school I sometimes saw teachers use overhead projection with transparent sheets.

One of my math teachers in high school brought a special device with him one day. This one https://www.calculatorsource.com/ti-89titanium-vs.html (or some other model by TI). It’s an external screen that you connect to a TI graphing calculator and then put it on top of the glass plate of an overhead projector so that you can project what the calculator is showing for everyone to see :)

If you’re interested in more on this, I highly recommend the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor/PM of PowerPoint.

...And created a lot of revenue for storage companies and headaches for email admins. When MS Exchange rolled out, people discovered that email database size was higher than typical for just email messages.

A little bit of investigation revealed that PowerPoint slide decks and other multimedia was consuming the increased storage since Exchange made it much easier to send large attachments to others.

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