Presentations and Slide Shows Before Powerpoint

February 10, 2018 6:53 AM

I've been playing around with reversal film and projectors and it made me wonder: how were business presentations prepared for the ol' Carousel?

I mean, obviously they're preparing 35mm slides. Were they somehow printed directly to the slide film? Or did people literally photograph and process each individual chart? What kind of rigs were used for this?

I might kind of want to put together an old fashioned slide show for work...

posted by hwyengr to Work & Money (14 answers total)

Best answer: hwyengr: "Or did people literally photograph and process each individual chart?"

This.

hwyengr: "What kind of rigs were used for this?"

Copy stand.
posted by Mitheral at 7:05 AM on February 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

PS: Really professional shows used two projectors. Slides were interlaced between the two and the projectors would fade back and forth so that there weren't flashes of bright white screen while switching slides.
posted by Mitheral at 7:07 AM on February 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Transparency film has also been a thing for some time, and you can print directly to it with a copier, inkjet or laser printer. (Using film designed for the appropriate device.) No need for a slide.

Otherwise, people just printed out the presentation and handed copies to all the attendees. “Turn to page one.”
posted by Autumnheart at 7:47 AM on February 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Overhead projectors using transparency sheets have been in use at least since the 1970s.
posted by slkinsey at 8:11 AM on February 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

I have my doubts as to whether carousel slide projectors (invented in 1965) were ever particularly commonly used for business presentations. This would have been expensive and time consuming. I think another thing worth considering is that projected business presentations really weren't all that common until relatively recently.
posted by slkinsey at 8:19 AM on February 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I have to disagree with some of the previous posters. I worked for a big city B2B ad agency in the early 80s that prepared a LOT of 35mm slide decks for carousel-based business presentations. We were working primarily with medical device makers, pharmaceutical companies, technology providers and professional associations. Carousels often ran unattended at trade show exhibits, and were live-narrated for presentations to large groups of members, potential customers or investors.

Film houses, who specialized in preparing film for press work, oversize transparencies for backlit kiosks and other displays, would work from the typeset art, photos and illustrations we prepared as flat art boards, shooting for conversion to 35mm. By the mid-to-late 80s, we were using a lot more digital processes to create the art, but still sending the digital files out to be converted to 35mm. Clients were still more comfortable using real slides that they could handle, rearrange and update on the fly in a familiar carousel.

It took most of our clients several more years to begin to be comfortable with doing presentations from their laptops for small groups. Laptop-connected projectors were still unfamiliar and seen as "too complicated" for the average sales rep on the road. That didn't change until the early-to-mid 90s, as I recall. By the end of the 90s, most of our clients were creating their own basic slide outlines in PowerPoint and sending them to us for design clean-up, editing, and creation of graphic/video/sound cue additions. By then, projected or cast-to-large-screen PowerPoint had become the standard for presentation in exhibits and groups large or small.
posted by peakcomm at 9:24 AM on February 10, 2018 [3 favorites]

Back in the '80s, working a large aerospace and tech company, we'd write up the slides in LaTex, print them on paper on a large and expensive laser printer, copy them to transparencies using a standard copier, and present with an overhead projector, manually switching out the pages. Sometimes, we'd write by hand directly on the transparencies.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:38 AM on February 10, 2018 [2 favorites]

I entered the workforce in the early '90s and they were absolutely in use. "Common" depends on the point of view. It's hard to recall because the nature of them (so very boring) means I feel it was a constant of my early career. Realistically I'd guess I sat through one or two a week. One place I worked in that era was a startup with ~100 people, and we had at least a few rooms that had a slide projector available.

Management presentations, job candidate seminars, sales pitches, and other talks people had worked up that they'd give more than once like a research summary from a professor would get this slide carousel treatment. (As a junior guy who only presented when forced to, I did only photocopy-to-overhead for my own stuff.)
posted by mark k at 11:17 AM on February 10, 2018

slkinsey: "I have my doubts as to whether carousel slide projectors (invented in 1965) were ever particularly commonly used for business presentations."

I don't know about that but I had several instructors in both high school (80s) and university (90s) who had slide carousels for all their lectures. Mind you at university it was old guys who'd been teaching Physics/Chemistry 101 for a couple decades.

slkinsey: "This would have been expensive and time consuming."

Yep. One of the major complaints directed at Harvard Graphics was that the ease with which computer slide presentations were created dumbed down presentations. Because of the cost actual slide presentations had a tendency to be of very high quality and as peakcomm laid out often involved several layers of professional editing, layout, graphic design, photography etc. So you didn't end up with, for example, over stuffed slides with six different fonts of teeny point size.
posted by Mitheral at 1:25 PM on February 10, 2018

My uncle owned a photo developing company in the 1980s, and more than once I was recruited to load slide boxes for presentations; a company would have five sales guys, they would order five sets of their slides, which needed to be put into slide boxes (we didn't load the actual slide projector trays themselves), in the right order, without missing any. It was an assembly line, one of his employees would be actually mounting the positive film in the slide frame (the images would be on the film like 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2, etc., because of ease of duplicating), another would mark the slide with a pen, another would organize them, etc, I was usually on the end just packing the boxes. So, at least in the 1980s, presentations by slide projectors were common enough in Fargo ND.

Edit: Oooh! Oooh! Almost forgot I own this: In the 1950s, filmstrips (you know, a roll of film, play the audio, when it 'dings' hit 'next', if you grew up before 1990) An Esther Williams Swimming Pool filmstrip sales presentation (self-link, I laid it out for the internet a long, long time ago)
posted by AzraelBrown at 4:12 PM on February 10, 2018 [1 favorite]

for under-funded social research units?

transparencies, transparencies, transparencies

(I just disposed of a whole lot from the late 1990s)
posted by jb at 7:22 PM on February 10, 2018

with an overhead projector, of course.
posted by jb at 7:23 PM on February 10, 2018

As one of the first people in the architecture firm where I worked in the late 90s to learn PowerPoint, I can attest that slides were commonly used for client presentations and proposals. We sent lots and lots of photos and printed material to studios by bike messenger (another relic) for transfer to slides. It was a huge hassle and everyone quickly realized the value of fully digital presentations.

I remember also using a lot of opaque tape to mask off parts of slides when a quick and dirty method of editing was needed.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 10:28 PM on February 10, 2018

In the 80's through 2000 I used to make slides for presentations, and was a partner in a computer graphics company in the 90's. Professional slides were done on a Forox, or Maron Carrel, or similar rostrum cameras. For a decade I had one in my bedroom, mostly used as a tv stand when computers advanced to the point of economically dealing with raster images.
A bit of history I find very amusing, in the early 1900's the mcintosh magic lantern was being touted for business presentations. Demos were being given near the triangle building in nyc. A century later the macintosh computer was being touted for business presentations, in a mac store near the triangle building.

There were hundreds of techniques for making slides. The simplest was to typeset or laserprint your text, and shoot it using kodalith 6556 film. This would give you a very opaque black background (regular ektachrome lets a lot of light through the black) and pure transparent letters. Color could be added with marshel oils, food coloring or sandwiching rosco gels in a wess mount.
Even before powerpoint there were computer systems creating slides, which were output to a film recorder.
posted by Sophont at 9:22 PM on February 11, 2018 [2 favorites]