The Computer Scientist Responsible for Cut, Copy, and Paste, Has Passed Away

[Recursion]

https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408

The advent of the personal computer wasn’t just about making these powerful machines available to everyone, it was also about making them accessible and usable, even for those lacking a computer science degree. Larry Tesler, who passed away on Monday, might not be a household name like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but his contributions to making computers and mobile devices easier to use are the highlight of a long career influencing modern computing.

Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study computer science at Stanford University, and after graduation he dabbled in artificial intelligence research (long before it became a deeply concerning tool) and became involved in the anti-war and anti-corporate monopoly movements, with companies like IBM as one of his deserving targets. In 1973 Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface we now all take for granted, and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” when it comes to commands for removing, duplicating, or repositioning chunks of text.

Xerox PARC is also well known for not capitalizing on the groundbreaking research it did in terms of personal computing, so in 1980 Tesler transitioned to Apple Computer where he worked until 1997. Over the years he held countless positions at the company including Vice President of AppleNet (Apple’s in-house local area networking system that was eventually canceled), and even served as Apple’s Chief Scientist, a position that at one time was held by Steve Wozniak, before eventually leaving the company.

In addition to his contributions to some of Apple’s most famous hardware, Tesler was also known for his efforts to make software and user interfaces more accessible. In addition to the now ubiquitous “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” terminologies, Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing, which is reflected in his personal website. In essence, it ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system’s various functions and apps. When they’ve opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor’s insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.

[Hoyt]

1. The man who made plagiarism easy.

[Throck]

3. Copy that.

[Lucid Dreamer]

14. ʇ/u .dn ǝpıs ʇɥbıɹ ɹǝʇndɯoɔ ǝɥʇ uɹnʇ oʇ pǝǝu I

[displacedtexan]

25. I just copied & pasted your subject line into my notes app.

Sigh.

[Lucid Dreamer]

30. I stole that alphabet from a post on a motorcycle forum in 2005.

I don't have all the letters, tho' so that limits my compositions.

pıɔn7

[LanternWaste]

5. As well as the man who made GUI's easier.

(every technological advancement allows for a greater ease of misuse of that advancement)

[lunatica]

26. Then someone came along and created a plagiarism spotter

I know quite a few professors in UC Berkeley who use software that catches plagiarism.

[Throck]

2. Ctrl, Alt, Delete

Amen.

Gone to the big blue screen in ether heaven.

But his memory lives on, or at least his FaceBook page does.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. X for scissors, C for copy, V for a glue-bottle tip.

As someone who works in content and publishing, I couldn't even guess how many times I use it a day. Cheers to Tesler.

[Recursion]

6. The contrast with UNIX/Linux is interesting

UNIX machines had 3-button mouses rather than the 2-button ones that IBM/Microsoft settled on (or the 1-button one Apple settled on). Instead of actively cutting you could (can) simply select any text and middle-click to paste it. I find this incredibly useful in a few circumstances, but on the whole I think Tessler was right here, and in recent years even UNIX has moved to control-C, control-X, control-V.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. Three-button mouses were too fiddly for me, and I've found I almost always rely on keyboard commands

because they're just so much faster. It's funny what a person gets used to.

[sdfernando]

8. I started using computers before the GUIs came out.

it was all CLI, so keyboard is what I am used to. I use the keyboard commands much more often then using the mouse...and yes, it is much faster to work that way.

[MineralMan]

9. I do the same. Taking my hands off the keyboard is not how

I operate my PC most of the time. Since I write for a living, keeping my fingers on the keyboard makes me more efficient. So, I use shortcut keyboard techniques most of the time, instead of mouse clicks.

I used to write PC World's word processing tips monthly column, and I always presented keyboard shortcuts as one of my tips every month. Nobody knows them, so it was an easy thing to offer that was popular with readers.

One of the things people don't know is that Microsoft Word lets you still use old menu-based keyboard shortcuts, even when the menu they came from no longer exists in the current version of Word. Microsoft preserves that stuff from version to version, for the convenience of it's long-time users.

My wife, on the other hand, uses the mouse all the time. The other day, I saw her scrolling up in a long document, using the scroll bar. I asked her, "What are you trying to do?" "I need to go to the first page of this." I said, "Press Ctrl-Home." She did, and said, "I'll be damned!"

[Hermit-The-Prog]

10. You can thank WordStar, Perfect Writer and Emacs

Just don't talk about vi.

[MineralMan]

11. Microsoft Word for DOS had similar keystrokes for commands.

The main reason Word became the final winner in the word processing world was it's "noun-verb" philosophy. Select text, then act.

The rest of the word processors used the format then type philosophy, embedding codes for formatting. Word never showed you the codes, while the others sort of forced you to look at them to change formatting. Word was simpler for non-techies to use, so it won.

The other thing Word for DOS did was use the mouse for things like text selection and cursor placement. Also easier. when I got my first PC, from a publisher for whom I was writing a book, it had Microsoft Word 1.1 with it, on 5.25" floppies, and the original Microsoft Mouse. It also made, and still makes, use of the function keys and alt and ctrl function key combinations for many things. Even Word 1.1 for DOS also had many Alt and Ctrl plus letter command shortcuts as defaults. It used Alt-b for boldfacing. now it's Ctrl-b, but the concept is the same.

Word can be clumsy sometimes, but its underlying philosophy works the way people do, so it succeeded while the others are all gone, now. "Type first and then select with the mouse and format." That works for people who write.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

12. I see you missed the whole anti-competitive, illegal monopoly era.

Nevermind.

[MineralMan]

15. Actually, no, I didn't. I was the chief reviewer of word processing

software at PC World, from 1987 through 2002. It was a big deal at the time. I was involved in changing how word processing software was reviewed. At first it was based on the features available. I convinced the magazine that it should be based on user convenience, ease of use, and ease of learning.

After that, the programs weighed those issues more than feature density. PC World did it first, and PC Magazine adopted the same methods later. The two magazines were heavily competitive with each other.

At no time did I ever consider corporate interests in my reviews. In fact, one year an upstart word processor, Ami Professional got our Editor's Choice award, because it better implemented available Windows technology than Microsoft Word for Windows 1.0 in terms of ease of use and ease of learning and its intuitive user interface. The screaming from Redmond reached dangerous levels.

Word for Windows won the next year, after Microsoft fixed the program. WordPerfect for Windows failed in both years, and never recovered. WordStar never got started, really, once Windows became the operating environment. Lotus bought Ami Professional and screwed it up. It went away quickly, which was a pity. IBM tried to produce a word processor for OS/2 and Windows. It was never released for Windows. After I looked at it, I asked them "Why are you even bothering? This is unusable." I continue to use Ami Pro as my personal word processor for several years, for its superior desktop publishing capabilities.

And that's that story. I missed nothing. I was in the heart of the conflict.

[Yavin4]

19. Wow. I find your story fascinating.

I always find the evolution of software interesting,

[MineralMan]

20. For me, reviewing software was part of software development.

Major magazine's reviewers had a lot to do with changes that got made in the software. Every year, I could see how what I wrote in reviews affected the next version of all of the word processors. In the late 80s and early 90s, a whole team of Microsoft people and people from other software publishers would show up at my little office in my little small town and stay for a couple of days with the beta versions of the next versions of their software.

My reviews took about a month to prepare, and every last feature of the software was tested. I can't even tell you how many bugs I found and reported. Most of them got fixed before the release version. I knew each of the major programs inside and out, because that's how seriously I took what I did.

There are still features in Microsoft Word for Windows that are there because I said, "Why can't it do this? People need this feature." or "This is clumsy. Why does it take so many steps to do something common like this?" By the time I reviewed the release version, most of the things I brought up had been implemented or changed. I did not get paid enough for my work, by any means, but I thought it was important and because I used those programs all the time.

I also reviewed modem communication software, BBS software, and BASIC Programming language software. Those, too, got the same treatment from me, and changes got made because I would mention their deficits if they weren't made.

That was a fascinating period of my writing career. Before I wrote about computer software, I wrote reviews of woodwoking tools. I did those in the same way and got changes made in some tools for the same reasons.

I never worked for any software company, except for my own little shareware company, OsoSoft, for which I was the only employee and did everything myself. But, that's another story for another time.

[denbot]

13. Was that the old Unix based e-mail write/edit program?

If it is I remember needing to use Unix commands to backspace..

[Hermit-The-Prog]

17. WordStar and Perfect Writer were written for CP/M

Emacs and vi were written for UNIX / unix (and the war continues to this day). Perfect Writer used a subset of the commands available in Emacs.

WordStar came with the Osborne 1 and both WordStar and Perfect Writer came with the Kaypro computers. Each could handle larger files, running in 64K of RAM, than even the much later MS Word for Windows could handle in a megabyte.

One I forgot to mention, that preceded Microsoft, is WordPerfect. It was a standard for lawyers for many years.

[tinrobot]

16. I love vi

So simple and direct. I find it much faster to use.

Of course, I'm a BSD geek from way, way back. Grew up using vi.

[cojoel]

21. I remember the first day I was shown vi, like in 1980 or 1981

At the time I was very proficient with ed, and said "I really don't want to learn a new editor". The next day I learned the new editor and realized how foolish I was the previous day.

There was one time I made some prototype changes to a GUI program in Java for a demo. Later when that feature was added one of the GUI engineers asked me what software development environment I used to make the changes. I said I used vi. He literally backed out of my office slowly and shaking his head.

These days I use vim.

[hunter]

28. I was using vi from its first days. I wrote a novel using it.

BSD was magic. I lived in the computer labs

I also wrote a lot of stuff on my Atari 800, first with Atariwriter, then Paperclip. Orson Scott Card was another Atari 800 guy.

These days I write everything in markdown using whichever text processor is handy. When I'm done I run it through pandoc to create my finished documents.

https://pandoc.org/

If I feel l need to do a sanity check I'll open my converted documents in LibreOffice or Google Docs. I don't use any Microsoft or Apple products unless someone is paying me. My desktop runs Debian.

What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get word processors didn't really exist when I started writing which may be why I find them distracting, or at least unnecessary..

I just want to write.

Keeping it simple has also kept me out of a lot of trouble as document formats come and go or slowly mutate.

Files I wrote in the 'seventies are still readable without any surprises.

[Yavin4]

18. George RR Martin uses WordStar to write his books.

https://www.cnet.com/news/george-r-r-martin-writes-with-a-dos-word-processor/

[Historic NY]

23. Good to know I get frustrated just answering emails...

which sometimes vanish, and FB comments on a government webpage. I hate when the computer retypes what I think I actually want.

I like to clang along an come back later to do a rewrite of correction. I use note-pad a lot but even that become frustrating at times.

[lagomorph777]

22. Brilliant guy who will never be copied.

[Historic NY]

24. And he won't be replaced.

[lunatica]

27. Z for zap too!

[lastlib]

29. (they're also consecutive keys on the bottom row of the QWERTY keyboard.....)

How convenient.