A True (sad) Story
Steven B. Zwickel
March, 2004
In the summer of 1981, one of our local radio stations—WZEE, or Z-104— had a contest. First prize was an Atari 2600 (officially called the Atari Video Computer System or Atari VCS) game set that looked like so much fun I really wanted to win. {By an odd coincidence, the prizes were donated by a man who eventually married my sister-in-law}Just my luck, I won the Grand Prize: an Atari 400 computer with an enormous 16K of memory.
When I got it home, I plugged it in and attached it to my TV set (it didn’t come with a monitor). Nothing happened. I read the manual and discovered that it couldn't do anything unless I bought program cartridges for it, so I sent away for two ROM cartridges—one that used joysticks to play basketball and another that interpreted BASIC programming language.
To make things happen on the screen, I had to learn how to program using BASIC, which took a few months of my life (let's just say I was between jobs and going through a divorce, so it wasn't a big strain on my other obligations.)
BASIC stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code and, by the following spring, I had learned enough to know some simple programming techniques, including how to change the color of the background on a TV screen (computer monitors were extremely expensive and color monitors virtually unheard of in 1982) and how to put lines of text up on the screen.
In those days, I was trying to make a go of it as a social worker in private practice, doing some counseling and running adult ed classes on interpersonal skills and relationships. I had been teaching a course on Divorce Adjustment for several months and had made a series of flip charts on heavy stock to illustrate the different topics.
Making flip charts that were neat and legible was hard work. I got the idea of using the computer to make the flipchart visuals come up on a TV screen and, after a few weeks of work, I had written a short program that would do just that—put a list of items on the screen and change to a different visual when I hit the down arrow key.
I took that little 16K computer to my class in April, 1982 and hooked it up to a big TV to show my visuals, thus becoming the first person to use the technology that eventually became Microsoft PowerPoint.
According to both Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia, PowerPoint was developed by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin for the American computer software company Forethought, Inc. and it became a real program sometime in 1985, some three years after I used my little Atari to show text on a screen.
Making visual aids on a screen seemed like such a logical use of the Atari that I never even considered applying for a patent my idea. But, who knew????
Sometimes, I could kick myself.
➡ Two good things came out of this experience: first, I learned enough about programming code so that it wasn't a deep, dark mystery and I understand how computers work. Second, because I became an early adapter of the home computer, unlike some of my contemporaries, I was never afraid of them.
