Larry Tesler, the man who taught the world the computer commands ‘cut, copy and paste’, died at the age of 74.
Tesler’s death was announced on Twitter on Wednesday by Xerox, where he had spent part of his initial career.
Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler had a unique innovative mindset. He studied computer science at Stanford.
After working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, he joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973.
Tesler specialized in human-computer interaction, ad worked with Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
He found the cut, copy and paste concept during his stint with the Xerox.
The concept of the command, Tesler always said, was inspired by old-fashioned editing method, which involved actually cutting portions of printed text and affixing them elsewhere with adhesive.
The command later became the most commonly used user-interface for both text editors and entire computer operating systems.
In 1980, Tesler joined Apple and worked at the company until 1997.
During his stint with Apple, he worked on products like Macintosh, QuickTime, Lisa, and the Newton tablet.
In fact, it was the Macintosh and Lisa (personal computers) to popularize the cut and copy-and-paste operations. In 1993, he was promoted as the chief scientist of Apple.
After leaving Apple, Tesler worked at Stagecast, Amazon, Yahoo, and 23andMe. Since 2009, he had been a UX consultant based in California.
