Larry Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing credited with creating the cut, copy and paste as well as the search and replace functions, has died. He was 74. Tesler was not nearly as well known as computing giants such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But he played an early, central role in making computers accessible to people without computer engineering degrees, i.e. most of us. Xerox, the company for whom he developed the functions, tweeted out news of his death. “Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas,” the company’s tweet said. Cut, copy and paste and search and replace functions are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom.
But before Tesler’s work, computer users had to interact with clunky programs in different “modes,” where the same commands meant different things depending on how they were used. Even an expert like Tesler found that to be a problem. The elimination of modes opened the door to how computer users have interacted with personal computers for the last 40 years. Much of that work was done not at one of today’s tech giants, but at a computer lab at Xerox. Tesler stayed at Apple until in 1997. In 2001 he joined Amazon, where he served as vice president of shopping experience. He then went to Yahoo in 2005, where he was vice president of user experience and design. He was issued numerous patents while working at those firms.
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https://www.news4jax.com/features/2020/02/21/larry-tesler-creator-of-copy-cut-and-paste-function-dies-at-74/
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