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Larry Tesler Has Died

gizmodo.com

41–50 of 163 posts

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#41

Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent. In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled with networking gear I desperately nee…

Great story, thanks for sharing.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#42

Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the discussion both productive and quite civil! I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thou…

Which side of the debate was he on personally?

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#43
post #3

RIP Larry Tesler, I ran into him a few times at meetup events in Bay Area, few people knew who he was as he kept a very low profile.

I met him at a meetup I went to out in SF while traveling for work. I didn't know anyone there, just going to kill time. I had no idea who he was just someone willing to chat with me for an hour or so. I started asking him what he did, and it was clear he wasn't there to talk about himself. Just struck me as a really cool, really humble, really approachable guy. With a lot of good ideas, and a passion for spreading curiosity. World needs more people like this, not less.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#45
I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news.

The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism. With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about advancing the state of research in the areas of programming languages, systems software, and human-computer interaction. There were many great people that were part of this group, including Larry Tesler and Don Norman. I completely understand why Steve Jobs shut down this group in 1997; times were rough for Apple, and the company couldn't afford to do research when its core business was in dire straits. But I wish Apple revived this group when its fortunes changed, and I also wish Apple still had the focus on usability and improving the personal computing experience that it had in the 1980s and 1990s.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#47
post #40
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. No, 1974 predates both vi and Emacs

You're right, I missed that. Vi's predecessor ex, which also had these operations, is from '76, so it also couldn't be it. However, Emacs's TECO, which also had yank, is from '62/'63, so that might've been one.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#48
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 inspiration for my username.
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