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Post by stanleyb on Feb 20, 2020 9:58:24 GMT
Larry Tesler has died at the age of 74.
Mr Tesler started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
It was thanks to his innovations - which included the "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands - that the personal computer became simple to learn and use.
Mr Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in California.
After graduating, he specialised in user interface design - that is, making computer systems more user-friendly.
He worked for a number of major tech firms during his long career. He started at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), before Steve Jobs poached him for Apple, where he spent 17 years and rose to chief scientist.
After leaving Apple he set up an education start-up, and worked for brief periods at Amazon and Yahoo.
Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere.
The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year.
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Post by MikeMusic on Feb 20, 2020 10:35:58 GMT
Required some lateral thinking to think about that and get it working RIP Larry
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Post by Slinger on Feb 20, 2020 11:39:17 GMT
I read about him this morning. He was a true innovator, and those, it seems, are literally a dying breed. Loads of “new” inventions seem to be built on the back of existing tech these days. Larry was of an age where he was the guy writing the templates, not using them.
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Post by MikeMusic on Feb 20, 2020 11:54:26 GMT
So much came out of PARC. Needs to be remembered especially when Apple are held up as the inventors for things Xerox had first.
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Post by MartinT on Feb 20, 2020 11:56:28 GMT
Agreed, Apple stole almost everything they claimed to have invented, including the mouse and laser printer. Not to mention the smartphone.
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