A presentation for Columbus's project
Latest update:
Playing with PowerPoint 2.0 for Mac, I found a neat little
presentation file called Columbus. It was included with the program
to showcase its abilities.
From Robert Gaskins's Sweating Bullets book:
'At the time [1980x], it was customary, including at Microsoft, for the
writers of manuals and collateral to make up some business such as
"Mike's Dog Grooming" or whatever, and to make very cursory attempts
at realism. The examples were trivial and boring.
'I came up with what I thought was a much better idea: the device of a
notional proposal being made to Queen Isabella by Christopher Columbus
seeking financing to sail to America. This topic was obviously merely
illustrative, so we wouldn't need to even mention that fact. It gave
opportunities to include bullet lists (of objectives), pie charts (of
colonial market shares), org charts (of the commanders of the three
ships), schedule charts (of the expedition schedule), financial tables
(of projected plunder), maps (of the proposed routes), and so
on. "Mike's Dog Grooming" offered much less scope for creativity.
'I bought a number of books about Columbus, including illustrated
volumes, so we could get the details of the Spanish monarchy's coats
of arms, and the right names (in full) for all the senior commanders
in the org chart. Much of what was in the sample presentations was
historically accurate.'
It's surprisingly amusing to read. I tried to open it with the modern
MS Office but to no avail; LibreOffice did recognise the file, but
failed to properly restore its formatting. Then, to get a single pdf,
I just converted a picture of each slide to an svg with potrace. It's
11 pages long, enjoy.
Tags: ойті
Authors: ag