"A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems."

Whitfield Diffie created a tool to help him explain a product, but it was the tool itself that was the great product. To understand how Diffie never made a cent from his creation of the game-changing invention of PowerPoint, read this 2001 article by the excellent New Yorker writer Ian Parker. An excerpt:

“In 1980, though, it was clear that a future of widespread personal computers—and laser printers and screens that showed the very thing you were about to print—was tantalizingly close. In the Mountain View, California, laboratory of Bell-Northern Research, computer-research scientists had set up a great mainframe computer, a graphics workstation, a phototypesetter, and the earliest Canon laser printer, which was the size of a bathtub and took six men to carry into the building—together, a cumbersome approximation of what would later fit on a coffee table and cost a thousand dollars. With much trial and error, and jogging from one room to another, you could use this collection of machines as a kind of word processor.

Whitfield Diffie had access to this equipment. A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems, Diffie had secured a place for himself in computing legend in 1976, when he and a colleague, Martin Hellman, announced the discovery of a new method of protecting secrets electronically—public-key cryptography. At Bell-Northern, Diffie was researching the security of telephone systems. In 1981, preparing to give a presentation with 35-mm. slides, he wrote a little program, tinkering with some graphics software designed by a B.N.R. colleague, that allowed you to draw a black frame on a piece of paper. Diffie expanded it so that the page could show a number of frames, and text inside each frame, with space for commentary around them. In other words, he produced a storyboard—a slide show on paper—that could be sent to the designers who made up the slides, and that would also serve as a script for his lecture. (At this stage, he wasn’t photocopying what he had produced to make overhead transparencies, although scientists in other facilities were doing that.) With a few days’ effort, Diffie had pointed the way to PowerPoint.” (Thanks Longform.)

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More about Whitfield Diffie from Steven Levy: “Mary Fischer loathed Whitfield Diffie on sight. He was a type she knew all too well, an MIT brainiac whose arrogance was a smoke screen for a massive personality disorder. The year of the meeting was 1969; the location a hardware store near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over his shoulder he carried a length of wire apparently destined for service as caging material for some sort of pet. This was a typical purchase for Diffie, whose exotic animal collection included a nine-foot python, a skunk, and a rare genetta genetta, a furry mongooselike creature whose gland secretions commonly evoked severe allergic reactions in people. It lived on a diet of live rats and at unpredictable moments would nip startled human admirers with needlelike fangs.”