The hugely popular “copy and paste” computer control, which became popular thanks to Apple, which installed it on the Lisa computer in 1983 and on the Macintosh the following year, has just lost its inventor.
“Your working day is easier thanks to its revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away on Monday, please join us in honoring his memory “. It was with this announcement posted on his Twitter account Wednesday, February 19, that Xerox announced the disappearance, Monday, of Lawrence “Larry” Tesler. Born in New York in 1945, he had spent part of his career with the American printer manufacturer. “The former Xerox researcher invented the” cut / copy “and” paste “,” find and replace “and many other commands”, said Xerox.
The inventor of cut / copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your workday i… https://t.co/DFPNSx0ocT
This graduate of Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California, specialized in human-machine interactions. He had notably worked for Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and the Xerox research center in Palo Alto.
Seventeen years at Apple
The ability to “Cut” and “Paste” a piece of text without going through many complicated steps would have been inspired by a technique before the digital age, which consisted in cutting out portions of printed sentences and fixing them elsewhere with adhesive tape. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had poached Lawrence Tesler from Xerox in 1980. The engineer spent seventeen years there, gaining the position of chief scientist.
He then created an educational start-up and carried out user experience work assignments at Amazon and Yahoo. Larry Tesler “Combined his training in computer science with a counterculture that computers should be for everyone”, responded the Silicon Valley Computer History Museum (Computer History Museum).
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