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Comment by goosedragons | Hacker News Reader

Because before digital projectors were a thing we had slide projectors. Much easier to create physical slides and flip through those with a slide projector than create a scroll of film and project that. PowerPoint and other presentation programs were the digital version of slides. For awhile you'd still have physical slides made from your PowerPoint slides. My father did that up to around 2000.

It's also just less fiddly to flip through pages or slides than scroll around.

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This is only half the answer. Microfilm has existed before slide projectors were popular.

I think it's more to do with the fact that humans respond well and are comfortable with a paginated format. "This information fits in this box." Scrolling does not offer that as an inherent part of the format.

And everything I ever looked up on microfilm was paginated, of course, just with multiple pages on the same piece of microfilm / microfiche. Maybe we could imagine reading a book on a scroll of microfilm with the entire book written as one unbroken column.

Bah! In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we wrote on transparent plastic slides using special pens, the way our fathers did, and their fathers before them! And then we displayed them using machines called overhead projectors, powered by halogen bulbs that always burned out at the wrong moment! Youngsters these days … what do they know?

We know to harvest the Fresnel lens from those overhead projectors to use as a magnifying glass to set pavement on fire!

That’s an appropriate application of technology if I ever saw one.

This. When Powperpoint first became popular you'd see people throwing in lots of animated transitions. 99% of the time these just made the talk look like a cheap used car lot commercial on local cable tv. Everyone moved on, and now when people use animation or transitions they tend to be mild and subtle.

when I was a kid I'd use those animations and transitions to make cartoons

Frankly, the only valid use of powerpoint animations these days is to implement an entirely new application [1].

[1]: http://tomwildenhain.com/PowerPointTM/Paper.pdf

I use animation quite a bit in presentations i put together. Usually the 'transform' type to show thw relationship between two consecutive figures like zooming into a more detailed portion of a system block diagram.

There were overhead projectors with transparency rolls, and they could provide an experience similar to scrolling on a computer screen. The content was usually hand-written with a marker on the transparency rolls, often during the presentation. This kind of overhead projector was popular in schools, but I'm not sure if anyone ever delivered a business presentation on a roll of transparency...

This is the best picture I could find on google: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/244154-REG/Apollo_VST...

And I think the reason these were popular was that it was a lot more convenient to scroll when you needed more writing space. It was more about working on the fly in front of students than creating scrollable presentations. At least that was my experience as a student at the time.

It was also a way to avoid handling chalk when whiteboards weren't a thing.

Also similar to most pdfs and documents nowadays. Even though most documents will never be printed, people still separate typed documents by pages.

I personally love the new pageless layout google docs has. Removes all the distracting margins and headers/footers between pages.

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