Published Sep 13, 2005
Yesterday we had a fun power outage. Popovich Hall was blacked out (making my bathroom break rather interesting), but at least it was a beautiful day out and we could all sit in the courtyard comfortably.
But then came the problem of class. The lights were back on by the time my Advertising and Promotions Management course started, but the computers were down. Every session, Prof. Badame shows Clio-winning ads and we discuss them; then we work through a case, with the help of her PowerPoint. Well, no ads, no PowerPoint this time — but Badame was prepared with the old-skool solution of transparencies that she could put on the overhead projector. This was pretty impressive, given that she gave an entirely new lecture for this year — she wasn’t just pulling from an archive, she had printed out transparencies just for us, just as a backup.
And this sure makes me think! I would have kept my PowerPoint on the network, and had a backup copy on CD-ROM or USB thumb drive. Neither of those works when the computer doesn’t. Sometimes it takes someone with long experience to be prepared for the failure of modern technology. Next time I have a big presentation, I think I’ll bring transparencies myself.
Still, the case sucked. So there were two sides to it all.
really, werent transparencies the best? i loved that thing, its little lamp-y thinger and the markers and the projection screen
damn kids today dont know what theyre missin
remember how mimeographs used to be cold and smell, too?
that was just the best.
I miss mimeographs. Purple is now underused.
My Stats instructor did pretty much all her presentations using transparencies. (Or, as they call them at IBM, where they were still a staple when I was an intern in ‘98 — “foils”.)
That’s interesting, they call them “foils” at Intel! I wonder if there was a specific, common transparency machine that would print onto foil of some sort at one time.
In the Advertising/PR world they’re often referred to as “decks” (never in the singluar).
I’ve definitely heard “slidedeck” and “a deck of slides”, though I can’t remember where.
As for Intel — the founders were “defectors” from Fairchild Semiconductor, whose primary customer was IBM. :-)