PowerPoint 4 for Mac was part of Office 4.2. The Windows world got PowerPoint 4 in 1993, a year ahead of the Mac version. PowerPoint 3, 1992ġ992 saw the arrival of PowerPoint 3, and the Web has almost nothing to say about it. The PC version (1990) requires Windows 3.0.
There’s very little information about it on the Internet. PowerPoint 2, now a full-fledge Microsoft product, shipped in 1988. It requires a Mac with at least 512 KB of RAM. It shipped on two floppy disks, one with the program and the other with sample files. Released on Apas Presenter and renamed later that year due to trademark issues, PowerPoint 1 is a 1-bit black-and-white only program that works on all System versions up through 6.0.x. PowerPoint 97 and 98 gave PowerPoint nonlinear capabilities, includes Visual Basic for Applications, and gains transitions and effects.
Prior to PowerPoint 97 for Windows and 98 for Mac, presentations were completely linear, moving lockstep from one slide to the next. The first Windows version, PowerPoint 2.0, was launched with the first version of Microsoft Office on May 22, 1990, which was also the release date of Windows 3.0. Microsoft acquired Forethought in 1987 and renamed the app PowerPoint. Microsoft PowerPoint began its life as Presenter and was published for exclusively Macintosh by Forethought, Inc.
