We interviewed the inventor of PowerPoint for our blog, and he gave a fascinating inside story of how he almost sold to Apple before eventually sealing a deal with Microsoft:
In addition, the inventor of Powerpoint has written an entire book on its development including this anecdote in great detail called Sweating Bullets[0].
https://blog.zamzar.com/2016/06/10/deal-of-the-century-how-m...
We also recently interviewed the creator of Microsoft Word who talked about working with Bill Gates in the 1980s:
https://blog.zamzar.com/2020/03/20/an-interview-with-richard...
For books I’d massively recommend:
- The Cuckoo’s Egg, a first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory[1]
- Founders at Work, for early Silicon Valley startup stories[2]
- The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson, for similarly wacky late ‘90s/early 2000’s startup stories[3]
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/98233.Founders_at_Work
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/119751.The_Nudist_on_the...