Bob Gaskins

Robert Gaskins was one of the inventors of PowerPoint at Forethought, Inc.. In the early 1980s he worked for Bell Northern Research

Lee Gomes wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Robert Gaskins was the visionary entrepreneur who in the mid-1980s realized that the huge but largely invisible market for preparing business slides was a perfect match for the coming generation of graphics-oriented computers.

From the jacket copy of the hardcover edition of Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint by Robert Gaskins:

Robert Gaskins invented PowerPoint, drawing on ten years of interdisciplinary graduate study at UC Berkeley and five years as manager of computer science research for an international telecommunications R&D laboratory in Silicon Valley.

Many original documents written by Robert Gaskins during the early history of PowerPoint's strategy and development are online for public access.

...
Wikipedia