Larry Tesler is the man you owe a lot even in his death, without his invention, I’m not sure where the world of computing would be now, probably people would have mastered the art of memorizing and typing huge loads of work. Can you really imagine a world with no copy, cut and paste? Can you use a computer for more than two hours without clicking these commands? We do it so often that even just a primary school kid who has been introduced to a laptop at home knows how to cut or copy a document from one place and paste it to the next field. It is one of the mere things computers do, yet so underrated and taken for granted.
Think of a situation you are hounded by deadline pressures and you’re supposed to transfer the content in a document say from your Microsoft Word into a Gmail account or some website somewhere? There is a high likelihood you would pound so hard on your computer, using unnecessary force, a problem that can be solved by just a 2-second click on copy and paste commands and you’re set to go, thanks to Larry Tesler.
Larry Tesler passed away at 74 on Monday, February 17, at his home in Portola Valley, California, United States. The reason behind his death is still unknown, but according to the New York Times, Tesler was suffering the effect of an earlier bicycle accident. Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, studied at Stanford University in California and later started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s. Though he was not so popular as Bill Gates, his inventions would later make computers accessible to the vast majority of people.
Larry Tesler is one of the pioneers of the early computing, he is the brain behind the ‘find-replace’, ‘copy-cut and paste’ computer functions that are used millions of times a day by millions of people around the world. In 1973, Mr. Tesler and another researcher, Tim Mott joined Xerox Holdings Corporation – an American global company that sells print and digital document products and services, where they help develop a program known as Gypsy- the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface that virtually eliminated restrictive modes which made text editing complicated. Xerox tweeted:
“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 Tesler left Xerox Holdings in 1980 to work for Mr. Jobs at Apple, left Apple in 1997 to join Amazon as vice president of the shopping experience, Yahoo as vice president of user experience and design, in 2001 and 2005 respectively. Mr. Tesler would later leave Yahoo to work as a private consultant to many companies like Western Union (WU) and note-taking app Evernote. His dedication to innovation, simplicity, and hate for modes made him personalize his California car number plate – NOMODES. He always wanted everything to be made as simple as possible. So, yes, CTRL C the link to this article and CTRL V to share somewhere as a tribute to this tech giant.
See also: R.I.P Bob Collymore – What everyone is saying about Bob Collymore
