Posted on 02/20/2020 10:53:10 PM PST by nickcarraway
Larry Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing credited with creating the cut, copy and paste as well as the search and replace functions, has died. He was 74.
Tesler was not nearly as well known as computing giants such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But he played an early, central role in making computers accessible to people without computer engineering degrees, i.e. most of us.
Xerox, the company for whom he developed the functions, tweeted out news of his death. "Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas," the company's tweet said.
Cut, copy and paste and search and replace functions are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom.
But before Tesler's work, computer users had to interact with clunky programs in different "modes," where the same commands meant different things depending on how they were used. Even an expert like Tesler found that to be a problem.
"Most interactive programs had modes, which always tripped me up," he wrote in a 2012 paper about the development of copy, cut and paste. Tesler became a champion of eliminating modes from computer programs. His personal web site was nomodes.com.
(Excerpt) Read more at ksbw.com ...
But I hope Clippy did a Eulogy.
I never even knew there was a person associated with it. Think of how much time and work my fingers were saved. Now he’s gone to that great clipboard in the sky.
Xerox invented everything.
He died??
NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you buddy, I use that feature every single day!
They can still clone him someday, maybe.
.
RIP, RIP,RIP,RIP,RIP,
Except for all the things Bell Labs invented, which is a lot.
In lieu of flowers, pleas make a donation to nomodes.
lol
Or just Copy and Paste him :)
Which modes in which he speaks? Never heard of this.
I thought he was a Word Perfect dude.
Xerox?
Something wrong here. I had a wordstar printer in 1980. It had copy and paste commands. This fellow has a book in 2012 and gets credit?
There will never be another like him.
I used to be in Merrimack Valley then Norcross. Damn shame and all due to bad management that walked away rich.
He wrote about his work during the 60s-70s in a 2012 article.
I worked for Xerox in 1970.
We were told back then, “Soon we would NOT be in the copier business”.
No one has ever figured out why they did that.
Xerox had solved every piece of the personal computer puzzle by that time.
Jobs saw everything, but the only thing he remembered was being completely mesmerized by the Xerox computer mouse.
In any event, a couple years later Jobs brought out the first Apple computer and Xerox disappeared as a competitor.
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