‘A brief history of the corporate presentation’ – Six Colors

What was PowerPoint before PowerPoint? Slide presentations. Big, fancy, multi-projector, multi-media slide presentations. As Claire L. Evans of the MIT Technology Review reports:

Before PowerPoint, and long before digital projectors, 35-millimeter film slides were king. Bigger, clearer, and less expensive to produce than 16-millimeter film, and more colorful and higher-resolution than video, slides were the only medium for the kinds of high-impact presentations given by CEOs and top brass at annual meetings for stockholders, employees, and salespeople. Known in the business as “multi-image” shows, these presentations required a small army of producers, photographers, and live production staff to pull off.

Want an example of a slide-based presentation? I’m pretty sure that’s how the, uh, “Flashdance”-inspired “We Are Apple (Leading the Way)” was created for Apple in 1984.

Also included in Evans’s story is a link to the proposal that led to PowerPoint being created, which is itself remarkable.

[via Scott McNulty]

—Linked by Jason Snell