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 ...
Control + Alt + Delete
He already moved to Apple in 1980, so his work at Xerox PARC was well before that.
Many brilliant mathematicians & researchers worked there, creating much of modern computer science. Professor John McCarthy [formerly with MIT] created the lab, staffed it, worked there, and taught graduate-level classes. John was a very influential AI pioneer. He famously invented / discovered LISP (List Processing Language) in 1955. Because of its almost total lack of syntax, it's naturally recursive. LISP source code structure is identical to LISP data. Everything is just a list – a string of delimited symbols bounded by parentheses. Lists can contain other lists, deeply nested. Since LISP code can modify itself by manipulating lists, it has an innate recursiveness – like the fundamental level of neuroplasticity. LISP became the programming language of choice for Artificial Intelligence research & development.
I was very lucky & privileged to take all of his classes. I learned LISP from John himself, along with other grad students [like Tesler] who also worked on projects at SAIL. The Lab had its own programming language, SAIL – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language. It had an ALGOL-like syntax, and many features that later became ubiquitous, like Pieces of Glass (POGs) – the precursor to Windows. Invoking a Piece of Glass was equivalent to opening a new window, except that POGs were transparent not opaque.
Much of the TCP/IP Internet protocols were developed at SAIL [under DARPA research funding]. Chunking data into relatively small "packets" that could be transmitted asynchronously in any order, then stitched back together in correct sequence, was a fundamental building block of Internet communication.
Other luminaries at the Lab included Alan Kay, who created the [object-oriented] smalltalk programming language. He also essentially created the design for a portable, folding, personal computer; half keyboard, half screen. Alan became an Apple Fellow.
Whitfield Diffie worked on cryptography. He developed – along with Martin Hellman – the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange algorithm, using Elliptic Curve math to enable public-key cryptography [1976].
Ron Rivest is another Stanford Computer Science PhD & SAIL cryptographer alumnus, who is the R in RSA Security.
Similarly with Rodney Brooks, who worked on Robotics. He invented & produced the Roomba vacuum cleaner.
There was a continuing interchange of ideas among programmers at SAIL, Xerox PARC [Palo Alto Research Center], & SRI [Stanford Research Institute]. Doug Englebart invented [1968] the mouse as a pointing & control device.
Perhaps the intellectual giant with the strongest claim to creating the pillars of modern computer science is Professor Don Knuth, author of the multi-volume Art of Computer Science. He is now Professor Emeritus of the Art of Computer Science. Stanford honored him with the distinguished Stanford Hero award [2011] for lifetime achievement.
Larry Tesler
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Hey, copy and paste still works. Thanks Larry.
A fitting eulogy.
Crtl-X and Ctrl-V
Wore those buttons out on more than one keyboard.
Seems like a minor function, but it is everything.
Millions of college students morn his passing. They never would have gotten through their term papers without the feature he invented.
Blind as a bat, two-fingered typists everywhere wish you Godspeed, Mr. Tesler! Thank you very much!
copy *.* c:\
I sort of remember the 9 commands we had in DOS 2 or 3; can’t remember. Been a while... since ‘89 or ‘89 on an IBM PS2/50 box.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DOS_commands
I miss WordPerfect.
I; for one; am eternally grateful!
GROAN!
A movable trackball?
As someone who works in IT, let me just say there is a person associated with every function. :-)
I thought it originated in EMACS, using the concept of the point and the range, i.e. placing a point before one byte in RAM, setting another point further in RAM and the region between providing a range. THe copy function was a CntlC command to copy that range into a buffer. THe CntlP command would then paste the range into a location specified by a new point in an open text file.
EMACS also had some time saving cut and past fcns, by word, line, paragraph, using the keypad, made editing so much easier.
“Control + Alt + Delete”
Righteously valuable function.
Wow, I am impressed by what you wrote. Congratulations on having had a great career side by side with such luminaries.
His developments have saved me huge amounts of time and effort over the years, and have always been among my favorite computer features. Well done, sir, and RIP.
Reveal codes, reveal codes, reveal codes! As told to me by my Word Perfect instructor.
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