What were you doing in 1975? The ISO50 blog, aka – The visual World of Scott Hansen - has displayed some great slides from a 1975 IBM presentation. Thanks to the Marktd people for pointing this out. In 1975 I was doing research for my doctorate at the University of Toronto and using equipment that looked a bit like some of these slides. It was punch cards and long waits for batch processing turnarounds. They did have a new Wang machine that would do a limited set of stats in real time. Here is an image from the larger collection in Square America that they did not show.

The ISO50 blog used the images to indicate the excellence in graphics prior to the getting locked into the limits of powerpoint. While I agree that these are more visually appealing, they required specialists and much bigger budgets than putting image making tools, like powerpoint, into the hands of regular user. I think that pre-powerpoint images like these can be inspirations for us to think more creatively with our graphics. We also have digital photography that can be integrated into our images and out blogs.

While I think the images are bolder, they do depict a world where both IT and image making were in the hands of specialists. You can argue that using powerpoint in a session takes away from a more direct connection with the audience. That would apply with these high-powered images also and perhaps they might even create an even greater distance. Here is one more that presents a very different image of what online means than we think today.