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 ...
RIP.
Thank you. Very interesting and informative.
That said, ummm what?
Grab a copy of "vi" and you'll get a taste of modes.
vi has two modes:
- command mode
- insert mode
In command mode, the letters of the keyboard perform editing functions (like moving the cursor, deleting text, etc.). To enter command mode, press the escape key.
In insert mode, the letters you type form words and sentences. Unlike many word processors, vi starts up in command mode.
Old WordPerfect was similar.
I hadn’t thought about WP in years until today.
Used that a lot when I discovered the feature.
WP to me was better than Word.
I’ve seen this exact post several times... I guess that’s a fitting tribute to Larry... RIP.
That's not true. CTRL-C and CTRL-V were how you copied and pasted in WordStar, an early DOS word processor. Many of its commands were adopted as standards.
I’ve worked in IT, but not developing operating systems. A lot of the programs I’ve worked on went through many hands over the life of it. It’s hard to pin something on just one person, especially if you’re looking for someone to blame besides yourself :)
Reveal codes was awesome. I believe you can still do that in Word somewhere.
Did a google search on how to use reveal codes in Word. There is a way to show formatting commands in Word but not to the same extent as word perfect. But it may be handy.
I was friends with Larry. He was one of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. He had a quiet presence, and was never condescending. I knew him from his Apple days when he headed up the Advance Technology Group and they were working on amazing technology. Unfortunately, like XEROX PARC not a lot of the developments ever became shipping products.
RIP
It’s been a long time, but I recall he was key in bringing discipline, design process and testing to Apple’s user interface work which first hit the marketplace with Lisa in 1983 and Macintosh a year later. He was a key player in the human-computer interaction culture that set them apart. The world at (some of) our fingertips is better for Larry’s long career.
RIP!
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