Forethought (company)

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Please improve this article if you can. (June 2007)

Forethought, Inc. was a computer software company, best known as developers of what is now Microsoft PowerPoint.

[edit] History

In late 1983, Rob Campbell and Taylor Pohlman founded Forethought, Inc in order to develop object oriented bit-mapped application software. In 1984, they hired Bob Gaskins, a former Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, in exchange for a large percentage of the company's stock. He and software developer Dennis Austin led the development of a program called Presenter, which they later renamed PowerPoint.[1]

Also in 1984, Forethought acquired the rights to publish a Macintosh version of a DOS-based application called Nutshell. They named the Mac version FileMaker and it soon became enormously successful.[2]

PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It ran in black and white, generating text-and-graphics pages for overhead transparencies. A new full color version of PowerPoint shipped a year later after the first color Macintosh came to market.

Later in 1987, Forethought and PowerPoint were purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $14 million.[3] In 1990 the first Windows versions were produced. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications (except for the Basic Edition).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Absolute Powerpoint
  2. ^ Glenn Koenig (2 April 2004). FileMaker Early History. Retrieved on 2007-10-05.
  3. ^ "COMPANY NEWS; Microsoft Buys Software Unit", New York Times, July 31, 1987. Retrieved on 2006-12-02.