from the R.I.P.-R.I.P.-R.I.P.-R.I.P.-R.I.P.-... dept.
RIP: Larry Tesler, inventor of copy & paste:
“You cannot reduce the complexity of a given task beyond a certain point. Once you’ve reached that point you can only shift the burden around.” ~Larry Tesler
One of the people who helped create the current age of personal computing passed away this week: Larry Tesler (74), the computer scientist who invented copy-&-paste while at Xerox PARC.
[...]Long ago, when Xerox wanted to invest in Apple before its IPO, Apple demanded and got the right to visit the fabled Palo Alto Research Center. The first such visit took place in 1980 (though some claim it took place in 1979).
Larry Tesler, then the director of PARC, acted as Apple’s tour guide.
Born in the Bronx in 1945, Tesler studied at Stanford University in California and was the man who led Apple’s Steve Jobs and his delegation on the historically important tour from which Apple took user interface and computer design concepts that became mainstays of the PCs we use today.
Things like external keyboards, mice, icons, windows — all of these elements had been in development at Xerox PARC, though it took Jobs and Apple to fully realize them, some say.
Jobs was so impressed by the demonstration, he reportedly yelled, “You’re sitting on a gold mine."
Teslar was also taken by his Apple visitors:
“What impressed me was that their questions were better than any I had heard in the seven years I had been at Xerox… the questions showed that they understood the implications and the subtleties.”
[...]Despite Tesler’s deep and sustained contribution to the industry (including contributions to the code inspection tools most developers on most platforms use daily), it’s what Tesler called “modeless text editing” (cut, copy and paste) for which he is most remembered.
He put the digital expression of traditional print-based workflows together while at Xerox PARC; this was one of the innovations Jobs (and others) were most excited about.
It was within a mouse-driven GUI called Gypsy, a click-and-type interface in which the user could, at any time, enter text at the current insertion point, or click where the insertion point should be repositioned.
[...]Xerox tweeted: “Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him.”
The Computer History Museum said Tesler, "Combined computer science training with a counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone."
And there is little doubt that the work he did in terms of user-focused user interfaces, including copy-&-paste, has become part of daily life for almost every human on the planet. Some contributions, it seems, are pretty hard to copy.
Also at gizmodo, 9to5mac, and The Next Web.
(Score: 5, Funny) by acid andy on Saturday February 22 2020, @02:28PM
RIP Larry. Stackoverflow probably wouldn't exist without you!
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @02:45PM (4 children)
That Lennart Poettering is still alive and wasn't the one who died instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @03:13PM (2 children)
That Windows is still alive and wasn't the one who died instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @03:20PM (1 child)
You can't reboot people.
(Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Saturday February 22 2020, @09:56PM
Yes, you can.
CTRL-ALT-BRICK
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Bot on Sunday February 23 2020, @11:34PM
Lennart won't die until he implements systemd-killd, obviously.
You see, signals are too difficult and confusing for modern, agile, computing, plus IBM, who leapfrogged MS in term of evil with a single acquisition, isn't making any money off them. So, with systemd-killd all signals will queue up on dbus (which has to be integrated into the bootloader of course) and be vetted against a proper ruleset. A redirection layer will take care of ... fuck am I doing, an average systemd dev might take this seriously. better go to sleep().
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @03:23PM (5 children)
It seems the current theme is that UI's need to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. And the lowest common denominator is really *really* low. Copying is complex work. You need to both be able to highlight and then press a hotkey on top of it. For that to become a standardized part of computing knowledge? Dear god, imagine ctrl+alt+del!
I think I'm joking, but I'm not sure. Instead now the trend seems to be to throw a million unlabeled icons at me hoping I can divine somehow that ╨ means "send to spreadsheet." Applications without tool tips on the incoherent buttons are especially awesome. But I mean it makes since, this is the year 2020. Tooltips are so 1999.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday February 22 2020, @04:08PM (2 children)
Not really. I copy-pasta'd the above on a phone - no hotkeys. And modal editors don't require you to highlight text. Ctrl-k b worked fine for marking the start of a block of text. Ctrl-k k, ctrl-k y, etc. No need for a mouse.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @01:06AM (1 child)
sorry what you are using ctrl-modifiers on a phone?
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Sunday February 23 2020, @02:06AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Saturday February 22 2020, @05:33PM (1 child)
Tooltips don't work on touch interfaces - which have no equivalent to 'hovering' with the mouse pointer - and nobody's thought of an alternative, and of course Mobile Is The Future whereas deskops/laptops are just for boring farts who want to get work done.
Shifting from mouse/pointer/click to multitouch is actually a big deal - you lose a lot of degrees of freedom (hover vs. click, multiple buttons, modifier keys...).
Problem is, although a surprising amount of deep thought by people like Tesler went in to the design of the original "WIMP" GUIs - but it all looks kinda obvious in hindsight so how hard can it be to completely rework the idea for mobile? (Ans: very hard, but the boss only cares if it looks good)
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday February 23 2020, @03:27AM
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @05:58PM (1 child)
Lawrence Gordon Tesler (April 24, 1945 – February 16, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!
While at PARC, Tesler's work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. While at Apple, Tesler worked on the Apple Lisa and the Apple Newton, and helped to develop Object Pascal and its use in application programming toolkits including MacApp.
Tesler was born on April 24, 1945 to Jewish parents Isidore, an anesthesiologist, and Muriel (Krechman) in the Bronx in New York City.[1] Tesler lived in the Bronx through his childhood and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1961. While in high school, he was guided towards computers by a teacher after showing the teacher an algorithm for generating prime numbers. Through this, he learned of a program at Columbia University where he was able to spend a half-hour each week on their computer systems, through which he taught himself programming before college.[1] He went on to Stanford University in 1961 when he was 16, studying computer science and graduating in 1965 with a degree in mathematics.[1][2] At Stanford, he had spent time as a student programmer for Joshua Lederberg on the LINC platform,[1] and was a colleague of Larry Breed, Charles Brenner, Douglas Hofstadter, Roger Moore, and Bill Strachan.[3]
During college and afterward, Tesler did some programming jobs on the side, and after graduation, worked as a consultant offering his programming services in the area. As he was one of only a few computer programmers listed in the Palo Alto phone directory he received a good deal of work. However, a regional recession caused this consulting work to dry up.[4] Tesler also worked at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) in the late 1960s. With Horace Enea he designed Compel, an early single assignment language. This functional programming language was intended to make concurrent processing more natural and was used to introduce programming concepts to beginners.[5][4]
During his time at Stanford, Tesler had participated in the counterculture of the 1960s, including the anti-Vietnam War protests. In the late 1960s, Tesler became involved in the Midpeninsula Free University, part of the Free Speech Movement, where he taught topics such as How to end the IBM Monopoly, Computers Now, and Procrastination.[6][1]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday February 23 2020, @11:37PM
This looks suspiciously like copypasta. Good.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 22 2020, @06:32PM (2 children)
Well, Xerox certainly had a lot of experience with copying, so no surprise that Copy&Paste was invented there. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @09:10PM
Who the hell invented https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pasting [urbandictionary.com]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2020, @12:13AM
So all Tesler invented is "paste"?
You know, if the dude had pulled the same stunt today, he would have been sued to smithreen by glue makers.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 22 2020, @07:32PM (1 child)
I've always called that one "Conservation of Effort". Unfortunately, in a siloed corporate setting, shifting the burden into another silo is considered genius.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday February 23 2020, @08:50AM
I think Larry Wall referred to it as "conservation of complexity" [johndcook.com] once in a talk. I suspect that if you believe that complexity can't be removed past a certain point, then you may have to sacrifice purity in a language's syntax or scope in order to improve its functionality in the same number of lines of code.
My question, then, is which languages do this (for some definition of) well, even just for a restricted domain of use?
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Saturday February 22 2020, @09:19PM
WRONG
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 23 2020, @12:34PM (1 child)
Control-Z as we know it was also invented by him, as well as Control-X.
Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
These are the core text editing primitives in the digital age, all conveniently located next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. Tesler chose those keys for this reason.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 23 2020, @01:34PM
So, not detracting from the pioneers - they were out there making the next things happen and certainly made a difference, often a positive one, however...
A lot of what Xerox PARC was coming up with in those years was inevitable, others had done it before them and if they didn't do it and bring it into the main stream, others would have done so shortly after they did. Major case in point being MacOS/Windows. The mouse is debatable, that one had a half dozen also-rans that have (mostly) faded away, with the track-pad/touch screen being the most durable alternative. I remember using early-ish touch screens at the World's Fair in Knoxville, 1980. I also became aware of somebody's (I think Xerox's) patent on using XOR to display an on-screen cursor, about a year after independently inventing and using it commercially myself around 1992 - they never came after us.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 24 2020, @04:13PM
I love it! I mean, who would want to do without it? It'd be like saying you'd like to do without one of your hands.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 25 2020, @10:18PM
I'm sure some publisher's guild is complaining about how copy and paste is ruining the publishing industry