PowerPoint co-creator Dennis Austin is dead at 76

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Dennis Austin, who co-created PowerPoint, passed away at his home in Los Altos, California, on September 1st, reports The Washington Post.

His son, Michael Austin, said he’d had lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain, according to the Post.

Austin studied engineering at several universities, including MIT and UC Santa Barbara, before going to work as a software developer, eventually joining the software company Forethought and co-developing PowerPoint.

The Washington Post notes that Michael Gaskins, PowerPoint’s other co-creator, wrote in his book Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint that Austin “came up with at least half of the major design ideas” and added that if he hadn’t been designing the software, “no one would ever have heard of it.”

The Atlantic in August published a story about “The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003,” saying that 20 years ago, people thought it would “corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time.” Still, PowerPoint has had its fans, too, including The Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne, though he loved it not for its intended purpose but for its potential as an artistic tool.

The software remains a key part of Microsoft’s suite of office tools to this day.

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