Dennis Austin, the principal software developer of PowerPoint, died Sept. 1 at the age of 76 in his Los Altos, California home.
The cause of death was lung cancer that metastasized to the brain, his son Michael Austin said, according to the Washington Post.
Austin produced the backbone of how students, the military, the C-suite and Wall Street learn in the modern world.
PowerPoint, originally called Presenter, was released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm. It transformed the process of making slides which was usually assigned to design departments or outsourced. With its creation, any employee with a computer could create, point to and rearrange information, per the outlet.
Austin worked alongside Robert Gaskins, a Forethought executive, to create the software, per the outlet. It was Austin’s job to make PowerPoint easy to operate. He did this with a…
