Cut, Copy, and Paste inventor dies aged 74
Larry Tesler, an Apple employee who invented cut, copy, and Paste, dies aged 74
Computer scientist, Lawrence Gordon Tesler Larry, an American computer scientist played a vital role in the development of a range of Apple products serving as Vice President of AppleNet and Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. Born in Bronx, New York, on 24th April 1945,
After graduating in Computer science at Stanford University, he worked in AI research before he went on to work for the legendary R&D facility, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973 where he developed to cut, copy and paste.
Tesler’s invention of cut, copy and paste, a function that is now taken for granted in modern computers.
Computer passionate, Tesler helped to create a system in which the user doesn’t have to switch constantly between different input states. Tesler met Steve Jobs in 1979 when Apple came to look around the Xerox PARC facility and was impressed by his mastery of seemingly every aspect of the computer industry. The systems at PARC would later inspire the creation of Macintosh, the first successful mass-market personal computer with a graphical user interface.
Tesler strongly believed in modeless that his consultancy’s website’s URL is nomodes.com and that website has a picture of what appears to be Tesler’s license plate which reads “ NOMODES”.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs saw this early research and used it as inspiration to develop better iterations of ideas for Apple products.
“We were technologists with very logical minds, but Steve also knew about marketing, distribution, finance -every aspect of the business you could think of,” Tesler said in 2011, a year after meeting Steve Jobs, Tesler started at Apple working on the Apple Lisa Project, an ill-fated first attempt at a business.
Despite being a competitive failure at the time, Lisa was an enormously significant step for computer technology and the advancement of human-computer interaction. After leaving Apple in 1997, Tesler also worked for Amazon and Yahoo and for the past decade freelanced as a technology consultant.
Tesler will be remembered as an encapsulation of hippie and high-tech culture that helped to create Apple as a company.