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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: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday February 23 2020, @12:34PM (1 child)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday February 23 2020, @12:34PM (#961375) Homepage

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday February 23 2020, @01:34PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday February 23 2020, @01:34PM (#961387)

    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.

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