Office Speak: “Next Slide, Please”

Near to the start of my full-time employment I joined a department that was responsible for IT Training and also to look after certain technologies. This was an engineering organisation and the engineering departments had their own IT functions, we were the people who did everything else. This was at the end of the age of 8″ floppy disks and the beginning of the 5″ floppy disks short reign, in those days training included a half day course on how to use a mouse. We measured everything in kilobytes.

This was a time before video projectors were commonplace. One room did have a video projector in it, but it was very expensive, low quality and about the size of a washing machine. Most of the training rooms, however, made use of a technology that had then been around for over 100 years – the over-head-projector (OHP).

Each training course came with its own set of slides for the OHP. For those of you who have no comprehension of what I am talking about, slides for an OHP can best be imagined as A4 sized pieces of thick cellophane with a cardboard boarder. The cardboard border had a cut-out in one corner, this was essential to the safe operation of the slides. Slides could be put on to the OHP in eight different orientations, but only worked in one. Knowing which orientation was a skill and required organisation and preparation. The administration of the slides was a tightly controlled activity and anyone who didn’t put the slides back in the right order, in the right orientation, would be castigated. Animation was a physical activity with extra pieces of the cellophane taped onto a slide adding content as they were flipped into place.

There were other rooms where a slide projector was used. If you don’t know what a slide projector is, then I’m sorry for this lacking in your education, you’ve missed out. Most families, in those days, had an uncle, rarely and aunt, who would insist on treating their family to a Saturday night picture show of their latest exotic holiday adventure. Skegness projected onto a woodchip wall is a sight to behold. Anyway, I digress.

There were times when I would sit in on someone delivering training, on these occasions I may well be asked to operate the slides. I became skilled in the operation of both an OHP and a slide projector. The trainer would stand at the front and deliver the material, stopping occasionally to instruct me – “next slide, please.” It was an obvious thing to ask in a day when that was the nearest we got to remote control.

Technology changes were standing just outside the door though and we were about to make a significant change.

Up until this point the slides that went on top of the OHP had been created in one of two ways – they were hand drawn, or they were produced by a professional printer. My job was to start printing transparencies on a desktop LaserJet printer via an application on a PC, something I embraced with relish. This wasn’t a cheap option in those days, but it was the forefront of technology. Desktop LaserJet printers were a few thousand pounds, the PC and software gobbling up a few more thousand, even the specialist transparencies that would work in the LaserJet printer came at a premium and were closely guarded by my manager.

More change was on the way, it was only a small step to replace the LaserJet printer with another new technology – the video projector. Even then, though, I would sit at the computer in the training room and accept the instructions for “next slide, please.” Even then, only certain rooms would have such lavish equipment fitted.

We now regard access to a screen as standard for every meeting room. It would be very unusual indeed for us to walk into a room and for there to be no audio-video set-up. Latterly, the projector has been replaced by television screens in all but the largest room. Some of these being delivered as part of a video conferencing set-up including cameras and microphones.

In recent years, though, the desire to show slides has increasingly moved online, with screen sharing being part of millions of remote meetings every day. But what about those slides? We don’t seem to be able to live without them, even though very few of them will ever see an actual physical slide.

The other day I was sat in an online meeting, one of those all-hands type affairs. There were several people presenting and again came the refrain “next slide, please.” It seems that the material we were looking at was being operated by one person and that person had the role of human remote control for everyone else.

All this took me back to an age when creating slides was a job and “next slide, please” required significantly more skill than pressing a page-down key.

Header Image: This is one from a little trundle up Crinkle Crags in the Lake District.