Sweating Bullets: the story of PowerPoint
The book Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint is a first-hand account of the design, development, and commercialization of Microsoft PowerPoint written by its creator Robert Gaskins.
It's a fascinating window on the software and computer industry in the 1980s, an era of rapid transformation driven by the personal computing revolution and the trasition from text to graphical user intarfaces.
Sweating Bullets provides insight and context not only on the story of PowerPoint, but on several aspects of creating software in the 1980s. For example, how Gaskins researched the presentation slides market to design the product, the development tools and processes, the practicalities of handling floppy disks and printed manuals, life at startups, seeking funding, and the acquisition of PowerPoint by Microsoft.
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