You may not know him by name, but Larry Tesler touched a huge number of people with his ideas. He was the inventor of our digital concepts of Cut, Copy, and Paste and many other bits and bobs of human-computer interaction. The concept, from the old typesetting days when you literally got out the scissors and glue, is so simple it is profound.
A Stanford graduate, he worked at Apple for 17 years. Apple incorporated many of his ideas into its then new Macintosh computers released in 1984. Larry also worked at Amazon, Yahoo and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him,
Xerox Tweet
His work certainly has had a profound impact on my life–on hundreds and hundreds of millions of people’s lives. He believed strongly that computers should be for everyone, and his work reflected the desire to make their use as easy and intuitive as possible.
Tesler created the idea of cut, copy, & paste and combined computer science training with a counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone.
The Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley Tweet
His cause of death was not released.
April 24, 1945 – February 16, 2020 (aged 74)
Main image CC 2.0, By: Smiles at Whisper