In particular, was the expression coined by a single individual or is it attributed to a document?
The only thing I've been able to find was a non-cited reference to its origins in the 19th century on Wikipedia. There are plenty of sites on their usage and shapes, but nothing as to when or who coined the expression bullet point.
Their use, according to Google Ngrams, sky-rockets sometime around 1985, peaking in 2004, which seems odd (to me) if they originated a century or more earlier.
Edit: The coining of the phrase (who first used 'bullet points' and when) is the primary interest. If someone knows the origins of the bullet (or other symbol) usage I would also be interested. I accept that the latter of these may be out of scope, so disregard at your leisure.
Best Answer
The OED's first citation for "bullet point" (in an online draft addition) is in 1983:
The term "bullet point" originally seems to have meant not the typographical symbol, but the text marked by the bullet symbol • in a list. That is, a bullet-point list is a list of points you are making in a presentation. For example, a Harvard Graphics manual (the predecessor of PowerPoint) in 1990 says:
However, the term "bullet point" was very quickly transferred to mean the symbol as well.
I have a theory of when and why bullet points were introduced, but absolutely no confirmation.
Looking through 19th century books, I can't find any bulleted lists. Lists are either indexed by numbers, or items are identified with spacing and indentation. When typewriters started being widely used in the early part of the 20th century, people started preparing typed documents with less care than they had taken with printed materials, and it was too much trouble to renumber lists while editing documents. So they started using asterisks instead of numbers. Printers took these lists marked by asterisks and used typographical bullet symbols instead.