Forethought, Inc.

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

Forethought, Inc.

Company type	Private
Industry	Software
Founded	1983; 42 years ago (1983)
Founder	Rob Campbell Taylor Pohlman
Defunct	1987 (1987)
Fate	Acquired by Microsoft

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]