Free Republic

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...

Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61. Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin's Pacifica, Calif., home. Raskin joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31, but left the company in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs. The Macintosh was launched in 1984. Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when...