Computer scientist Larry Tesler, bets known for inventing the computer concepts of cut, copy and paste, has passed away at age 74.<\/p>\n
Tesler was born in New York in 1945 and he studied computer science at Stanford. After graduation, he worked in the university’s genetics and computer science departments before becoming a research assistant at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.<\/p>\n
In 1973, Tesler joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC<\/a>) and this is where he developed cut, copy and paste. These concepts were instrumental in the development of text editors<\/a> and early computer operating systems.<\/p>\n While cut, copy and paste were developed at PARC, the research center is more well known for its early work on graphical user interfaces and using a mouse to navigate them because Apple co-founder Steve Jobs<\/a> used many of its ideas as inspiration for Apple’s products. In fact, Tesler was even part of some of Jobs’ visits to Xerox<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to creating cut, copy and paste, Tesler was also a big proponent of a concept called “modeless” computing. Basically modeless computing revolves around the idea that a program should not have different “modes” where a user’s input works differently depending on which mode they’re in.<\/p>\n According to Tesler’s personal website<\/a>, he and a colleague named Tim Mott developed the idea while working on the Gypsy text editor back at PARC. He was such a big believer in modeless computing that the URL of his site is actually nomodes.com.<\/p>\n Tesler joined Apple in 1980 and he worked at the company until 1997 where he eventually rose to the role of Chief Scientist. During that time, he worked on a number of products including the Macintosh, QuickTime, Lisa and even the Newton tablet. The Macintosh<\/a> and Lisa were the first personal computers ever to include cut, copy and paste functionality as a result of Tesler’s involvement in their development.<\/p>\n After leaving Apple in 1997, Tesler had several short stints at a number of other big companies including Amazon, Yahoo!, 23andMe and others. <\/p>\n Tesler’s contribution to computing won’t be forgotten any time soon as the concepts of cut, copy and paste<\/a> have become fundamental to how we use computers and even smartphones today.<\/p>\n\n
Modeless computing<\/h3>\n
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