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posted by martyb on Saturday February 22 2020, @01:19PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @03:20PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 22 2020, @03:20PM (#961039)

    You can't reboot people.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by edIII on Saturday February 22 2020, @09:56PM

    by edIII (791) on Saturday February 22 2020, @09:56PM (#961180)

    Yes, you can.

    CTRL-ALT-BRICK

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    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.