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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: 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.
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(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