Larry Tesler is dead. Farewell to the inventor of the Copy and Paste that revolutionized computer science

Larry Tesler died at the age of 74 at the beginning of the week. His name may not say anything but in fact the Apple programmer, with whom he worked until 1997, is nothing more than the inventor of the now well-known “Copy and Paste” gesture that we all use daily on the web and beyond. Tesler invented it when he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a company known for having developed the interface we use with the mouse in the 70s.

Copy and Paste: this is how it was born

Tesler has revolutionized interface systems that we know and use today. It is to him that we owe the possibility to write on any writing program, a letter or a number on the keyboard such as to immediately correspond to the appearance of the same symbol on the screen. A system that we now consider obvious, but once upon a time each key on the keyboard could correspond to a different amount of commands. The interfaces invented by Tesler have streamlined the most used systems in the world.

Tesler worked for the Artificial Intelligence Lab that is, an institute on cognitive models and an algorithm for understanding natural language that just came out of Stanford University. A project that somehow anticipated what we now call Artificial Intelligence. He then moved on to Xerox PARC and in those years he created the well-known software together with his colleague Tim Mott Gipsy which allowed the elaboration of the texts. Here the commands that we use today, such as, came to life “Cut, Copy and Paste” and that allow you to speed up any operation on your computer.

subsequently Tesler also landed in Apple with a service for Steve Jobs and Tim Cook until 1997. Here he became Chief Scientist and had the opportunity to work on defining the user experience of Mac products. Tesler’s vision was always futuristic and not trivial, that’s what colleagues say. Indeed, today his “copy and paste” may seem trivial but it is clear that it has gone down in history as one of the most useful and used commands to speed up any type of operation.