Larry Tesler, inventor of cut-copy-paste, passes away at 74
Larry Tesler, the computing icon who invented famous interface tools - cut, copy, and paste, passed away on Monday. He died at the age of 74 and is widely recognized for coming up with innovations that eventually made computers what they are - easy to use. He called himself one of the grandparents of the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Macintosh, rather cheekingly.
Tesler specialized in graphical user interface design
Born in 1945, New York, Tesler was a Stanford graduate specializing in graphical user interface design. He first worked on AI research and then joined Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, known for its early work on GUIs and making them accessible with a mouse. There, Tesler developed cut, copy, paste, find, and replace - functions that form the core of text-editing and computing today.
Idea from physical cutting-and-pasting
Tesler got the idea of cut, copy, and paste from the old-school method that people used for the purpose of editing - cutting printed texts and gluing them somewhere else. He kept the concept the same but optimized it for personal computers.
Here is the obituary from Xerox
Then, he worked at Apple, became chief scientist
After getting attention for cut, copy, paste and spending most of his career at Xerox, Tesler was roped in by Steve Jobs to work for Apple. He worked for 17 years there, contributing to products like Macintosh, QuickTime, and Lisa, and rose to the position of chief scientist. In fact, it was because of Tesler that Apple implemented cut-copy-paste on the original Macintosh.
Worked at his own education start-up, Amazon, Yahoo
After quitting Apple in 1997, Tesler started his own educational software company. The scientist even had a few short stints at Yahoo, Amazon, and 23andMe. Interestingly, he was one of the strongest advocates of modeless computing, an idea that suggests computer programs and apps shouldn't have different modes for different functions. Tesler thought modes made computing complicated and time-consuming.
Notably, his website, car plate all spoke about 'No modes'
Tesler was so strong an advocate of modeless computing that his website was titled nomodes.com and car's license plate read 'No Modes'. Even his Twitter handle was named"@nomodes". Here is his resume: http://www.nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/CV.html.
