Larry Tesler began his work in the emerging field of computing in Silicon Valley during the early part of 1960s. This was an era when computers were inaccessible to most majority of people, only read about in newspapers or glimpsed in the movies. Working for Xerox, as CNN discusses, Tesler spent much of his career developing functions to make computers easier to use, something that coincided with the period just prior to the affordable home and office computers. Xerox at the time developed the the mouse and the graphical user interface, helping to display graphics as well as text on a screen.
Tesler main innovation, or at least the one that is most commonly used today, are the “cut”, “copy” and “paste” commands. Such simple key strokes, for important functionality, helped to make the personal computer simple to learn and use.
On February 17, 2020 Tesler passed away aged 74, although his death was not announced until a few days later, tweeted by his former employer Xerox: “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.”
After his spell at Xerox, Tesler was recruited by Steve Jobs to work at Apple, where he occupied the role of chief scientist for 17 years. Here the cut, copy and paste commands were used on the first Apple computer, called Lisa, as Sky News reports. This then led to the development of Apple Newton. Also while working for Apple, Tesler worked on Object Pascal which became the key application programming toolkit for the MacApp (Apple Computer’s object oriented application framework).
Following his time at Apple, the BBC notes that Tesler went on to found an education start-up, and also worked for brief periods at tech giants Amazon and Yahoo.
