Forethought, Inc.

Last updated

Forethought, Inc.
Company type Private
Industry Software
Founded1983;42 years ago (1983)
Founder
Defunct1987 (1987)
FateAcquired by Microsoft

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

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 Robert 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 named 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. That year, Forethought was purchased by Microsoft Corporation for $14 million (~$32.2 million in 2023). [3] [4] In May 1990, the first versions for Windows 3.0 were produced. Since 1990, PowerPoint has been a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications except for the Basic Edition. Microsoft PowerPoint would go on to become the most used and sought after presentation suite, having a 95% market share. [5]

References

  1. ↑ Parker, Ian. "Absolute Powerpoint". Ohio State University. Archived from the original on 26 August 2021. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  2. ↑ Koenig, Glenn (2 April 2004). "The Origin of FileMaker". Dancing-Data. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
  3. ↑ "COMPANY NEWS; Microsoft Buys Software Unit" . The New York Times. 31 July 1987. Retrieved 2 December 2006.
  4. ↑ Keefe, Patricia (3 August 1987). "Microsoft buys Forethought". Computerworld. p. 81. Retrieved 1 November 2024.
  5. ↑ "Best PowerPoint Examples, Plus a Useful PowerPoint Template (2024) - Shopify UK". Shopify. Archived from the original on 8 September 2024. Retrieved 13 June 2025.
Factory USA.svg

This United States software corporation or company article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.