Larry Tesler, Computer Scientist Responsible for Cut, Copy, and Paste Passes On

The computer scientist, Larry Tesler, behind the cut, copy and paste operation in our computers, died on Monday, 17^th February 2020, aged 74.

His death was announced on Twitter by Xerox where he earlier on worked for during his career as a researcher and Computer Scientist.

Larry Tesler 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.

Tesler was born in 1945 and studied computer science at Stanford University, specializing in human-computer interaction.

He made valuable contributions as a researcher and scientists working in different organizations such as Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

According to Wikipedia, the term “cut and paste” comes from the traditional practice in manuscript-editing where people used to cut paragraphs from a page with scissors and paste them onto another page.

Inspired by this, Larry Tesler and his colleagues at Xerox implemented several text editors in computers that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.

Due to this great achievement, Tesler was recruited to work for Apple in 1980 by the late co-founder Steve Jobs.

Within Apple, Larry widely popularized the computer-based cut/copy-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) computer operating systems and applications

Larry spent 17 years at Apple, rising to Chief scientist. He went on to establish an education startup and did stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.