“You didn't have to update its software, right? You didn't have to worry about annual agreements around it, right?… Textbooks are literally software. And as a result, textbooks are constantly changing… The kind of beautiful nature of the overhead projector is it functioned exactly as you needed it to… The thing that you have displayed next to you worked exactly how it did 60 years ago.”

Version History · October 2026

The education scholar is asked why ideas about the overhead projector settled so quickly. It just worked, he says, and he contrasts it with today's software textbooks, which change constantly and now come with AI features he thinks mostly make them worse.

Version History · 2026-10-18 Listen to the episode → More from Antero Garcia →

Transcript

Version History Around 30:22 into the episode

Speaker 3

Yeah, you need a new firmware update for that. For that projector.

David Pierce

…settle and normalize? And it's like we spend a little bit of time. Everybody goes to the training, they learn, don't write too much text, have simple layouts, and it kind of calcifies. Like, it doesn't seem like there's a ton of new ideas about overhead projectors for a very long time after this. I

Speaker 3

…software. And as a result, textbooks are constantly changing. And for the most part, most textbooks today have AI stuff embedded in them for better and worse. I would argue largely for worse, right? That they're bloated and don't actually function in the same way that the textbook that I went to school with and that I used with my students operated in the past. And so, in some ways, right, the kind of beautiful nature of the overhead projector is it functioned exactly as you needed it to. And assuming that the bulb was working and that you had a cord that was long enough to reach the wall, you knew exactly what it was going to do and is always going to do it in that way, right? Like the thing that you have displayed next to you worked exactly how it did 60 years ago. And assuming you can still have a bulb 60 years from now, will continue to do exactly what it does now.

David Pierce

Yeah. And I think that that winds up being A, a huge part of its power and B, a huge part of why it was very hard to get rid of for better and for worse, even once we maybe had something better, which actually kind of leads to sort of the next moment in the story, which is we get to about 1985. And…

Jake Kastrenakes

Where are you imagining the overhead projector popping up? Like, do you want one in your living room? This is going to be my question

David Pierce

to you. I'm

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Version History

“Anything people can do to make teachers' lives a little bit easier turns out to be very powerful and very hard to walk away from because teachers are so overwhelmed, so overloaded, have too much to do all the time. And if you can just find a way to make a teacher's life a little easier, you can almost always worm your way into a classroom for better or for worse.” — David Pierce, Version History

“It costs $100. That ends up being really important. They sell a few million of them. It definitely counts as a hit. But then the most interesting thing happens, which is everybody who bought an iPad buys a new iPad and they give their old iPad to their kid. And that absolutely kills the LeapPad.” — David Pierce, Version History