Robert 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, leveraging a decade of interdisciplinary graduate work at UC Berkeley and a five-year tenure managing computer science research at an international telecommunications R&D lab in Silicon Valley, is credited with the invention of PowerPoint.

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