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Larry Tesler Has Died

gizmodo.com

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Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#11

Post by Stratoscope »

Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young.

We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years.

Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE, complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend made for him:

   DON'T
  MODE ME
    IN
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/...

A couple of other good articles:

https://gizmodo.com/1841787408

https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b91...

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#14

Post by dmazin »

He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1]

NO MODES!

https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes...

[1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions (http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler)

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#15

Post by jolmg »

dmazin wrote: post #14

He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1] NO MODES! https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes... [1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions ( http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler )

The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have this bit that's cited to that book:

> Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.

I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers to vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save as if killed", and yank. I wonder what other editors had back then, before the names he came up with became standardized.

I also wonder how the idea of the operations developed before Larry Tesler contributed to it.

Looking at POSIX[2], it seems ex has delete, yank, and put, but I can't see similar functionality in standard ed (GNU's ed does have yank, but I guess it's an extension).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz...

[2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#18

Post by jcynix »

jolmg wrote: post #15
dmazin wrote: post #14

He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1] NO MODES! https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes... [1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions ( http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler )

The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have this bit that's cited to that book: > Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he an…

There's more than emacs or vi in "editor history" e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 and follow-ups at Xerox PARC.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#19

Post by aresant »

A career in full from his own CV:

"Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500 corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers, designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products."

http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#20

Post by samatman »

Wow serious Baader-Meinhof effect!

I recently downloaded all the PDFs from http://worrydream.com/refs/, and was reading Larry Tesler's A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste on my flight Monday.

It's a good paper, you can find it at the link above if you're in the mood to read it in memoriam.

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