Is Prezi the new Power Point?

Maybe. I like Prezi (but I never ever used Power Point as I use Prezi in a different way, not presenting). I find the challenge of using Prezi the smart way is to avoid making the audience seasick. It helps to mind map what you're going to design with Prezi and to always use the most gentle and smoothest pathes possible.

Of course, there were pretty dull filmstrips to teach kids history and such, too.Ah, filmstrips. I'd totally forgotten about those. You loaded an exposed & developed roll of 35mm film into a canister attached to a projector, and threaded the film into the gate. If I remember correctly, there was narration contained on a record or tape, and that narration contained a beep. The audio was attached not only to a speaker so the class could hear it, but to the projector as well, and the beep caused the projector to advance the roll of film to the new image.

I'm not sure what advantage these had over just using a box of slides in a regular slide projector, but I guess the Carousel hadn't been invented yet (these were used in the 1950s).

I seem to remember that each image was about 24x16 mm instead of 36x24 for 35mm still cameras. The film fed vertically through the projector, rather than horizontally, and a little mask had to be inserted to cater for the smaller image. The film was advanced by hand. They were always black and white.

We had mostly color ones back when i was in grade school in the late 60's/early 70's. Yes, the images were half-frame, which was actually the size used in 35mm movie cameras. I know that auto-advance ones exist, but our school only had the manual hand-crank models.

What was the advantage over slides? You could fit a strip of 80 images in a 35mm film canister sized container that cost 3 cents. That many slides would have needed two $15 carousels and taken up nearly 200 times as much space.

Half-frame 35 was called the "Photofinisher's Nightmare."
That was, until the Instamatic came along. It was only 17x13 mm. Very popular with people who ordered 11x14" enlargements ;?)

The advantages over slide projector carousels was that images in a film strip cannot get out of order when spilled, easier to package and ship, & cheaper to produce. Two types dominated the market in the middle 60s: the Dukane system and another the name of which I have forgot -- could have been Bell & Howell.. Dukane used a 33 rpm disc with a patented image change system that used a 50 Hz tone that was interrupted by a 30 Hz tone, when a slide change was needed. The tone arm on the disc player that was part of the projector had a rubber plug that connected two metal parts of the arm. The result was a pronounced very low frequency resonance in the arm that enhanced the pickup of the control tones. The 50 Hz tone, when present, locked out the slide change circuit. The phono pre-am/amp had a high pass filter that cut everything off --to the speaker -- below about 150Hz. The other system used an audible 1 kHz tone that enabled either manual or automatic film strip advance. There was a branching circuit playback amplifier with one leg passing through a band pass filter set at 1 kHz. That advanced the image.

SecondWind-SK, that is a great description of the technology. I remember actually hearing the beep, so our system must have been using the second type of technology, with the 1 kHz tone.

I remember in high school, some buy wanted me to help him create a continuously running slide presentation with audio. His idea was to use a record (he had created a recording of his narration using one of those demo record services). Even though my engineering degree was six years into the future, he thought I knew enough to create something like this. I got as far as painting white dots on his record and then using a photo sensor, but I didn't know enough electronics to amplify the signal, and the sensor was not very well focused. It was a complete failure, and he had to stand next to the demo at the science fair, like everyone else, and explain the same thing over and over.

Words of hymns on transparency sandwiched between two pieces of glass.
Projected onto a screen in a church basement.
Audio track provided by children singing,.. pianist.
Circa 1955?

I can see why they would want some meetings to be dynamic and fluid and can understand their want to ban powerpoint.

Being in IT, I have heard many refer to ppp's as decks. I think it is mostly from the older people that actually remember or used the 35mm carousel type slide presentations.

The real problem I have with them is that some people, with apparently too much time on their hands, creates them for trivial use. They use PP only so they can include all the transitions and effects. For example, I remember one that was 7 pages (slides) for a company picnic where one pic would have sufficed. A little while later there was an executive message sent out to curtail the use of PP for company emails. :)

I use them to cross the barrier between those people that won't RTFM but have to be aware of new applications or new features in proprietary apps. However, I can also address all their questions as they arise. The ppp's are then just made as a collection of slides rather than a fully scripted presentation.