Cut-Paste creator Larry Tesler has passed away

Our parents keep insisting that computers are hard to use every time they call us into their offices when were home for holidays; computers used to be much harder to use, though. Some features of modern computing can be so basic that they feel like they always existed, but everything an OS does was coded by someone sometime. Computer scientist Larry Tesler, who passed away this week, gave us the gift of cut, copy, and paste.

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Tesler, born in 1945, was around in the earliest days of modern computing. He was at Xerox PARC from 1973 until 1980. Famously, the Palo Alto Research Center pioneered the mouse-driven graphic user interface but failed to capitalize on it. While there, though, Tesler worked on a word processor called Gypsy, which is where the terms Cut, Copy, and Paste first appeared.

This led Tesler to become an advocate for something called "modeless computing." Those of you who edit text in *nix systems (and things like that) already know where this is going. Command-line-driven word processors typically used modes, where switching modes would change what certain keys did. That has its applications (and you're in for an argument if you tell your sysadmin friends otherwise).

For general accessibility, though, modeless computing is key. The idea behind modeless computing is that of universality. Regardless of where you are in the operating system, Cut is Ctrl+X and so on.

Tesler continued to advocate for modeless computing

After working at PARC, Tesler spent almost two decades at Apple, working from 1980 until 1997. While there, he held positions like that of VP of AppleNet and Chief Scientist. He held positions at companies like Amazon, Yahoo, and 23andMe up through 2009, after which point he focused on consulting. Throughout all that time, he continued to focus on accessibility and ease of use. His Amazon position, for example, was the VP of Shopping Experience.

During his time, Tesler was not only responsible for one of the most fundamental functions in computing, but he also pioneered a way of thinking that helped make computers accessible for billions more people. And yet, dad still doesn't understand copying and pasting.

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