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Larry Tesler Has Died

gizmodo.com

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Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#81

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

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 )

RIP Larry Tesler

i have a .vimrc file that set C-C/C-X/C-V to work in each mode; that gets me the best of both worlds: fast text navigation in normal mode as i can switch to the next/previous word with w/b; but I can still copy and paste (limits us to one buffer, though; nothing is perfect)

https://github.com/MoserMichael/myenv/blob/master/VIMENV.md

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#82

Post by dntbnmpls »

crobertsbmw wrote: post #69
dooglius wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I was wondering how you managed to reverse the hash and then had a facepalm moment.

I still don’t get it.

https://www.ascii-code.com/

Those numbers represent the hex ascii code.

To get you started.

53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50

53 = S

41 = A

4e = N

...

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#83

Post by nl »

aresant wrote: post #19

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

ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) Holdings, ltd Cambridge, England (co-founder)

Championed the spinout of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) from Acorn plc and served on ARM’s board for 13 years.

That turned out fairly well....

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#85

Post by svat »

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways:

- It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf

- Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...

Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#86

Post by Shebanator »

mikelevins wrote: post #58

I met Larry in about 1992 when I went to work on the Newton project. I had seen him around Apple before, and I knew who he was and what he was known for, but I didn't actually meet him until I joined the Newton team. I found him friendly, modest, smart, shrewd, compassionate, full of interesting knowledge and ideas, and interested in other people and their ideas. I got to know him better when John Sculley ordered him…

This is a great story, definitely made things a little dusty for me. Thanks for sharing. My own experience with him was also special - he was such an amazing kind, generous, and insightful person. And he would easily qualify for my "ten smartest people I've ever met" list if I was the sort of person who made such lists :-)

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#87

Post by mikelevins »

djrobstep wrote: post #74
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 )

Is there somewhere he elaborates on his No Modes philosophy? Is it a blanket rule for him for all interfaces, or just text editors?

I don't know if he wrote anything formal, but I remember from talking with him, from his critiques of particular interfaces, and from projects that he was interested in, that he favored UI that made operations as concrete and manifest as possible, that made it as easy as possible to discover operations by experimenting, that made mistakes as low-cost and painless to recover from as possible, and that featured direct manipulation.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#88

Post by jolmg »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #77
jolmg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_(text_editor)

Ed doesn't seem to have those operations. GNU ed's documentation includes yank, but it's not described in POSIX.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#89

Post by jolmg »

wnoise wrote: post #61
fsckboy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end…

Ah! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to with the q command.

I wonder if they're supposed to be "q(uick) registers".

EDIT: Maybe not:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12081/why...

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#90

Post by jolmg »

raphman wrote: post #68
jolmg wrote: 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…

FWIW, Larry also contributed some of his historical knowledge to the Talk page [1] of the Wikipedia article and also edited the article himself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cut,_copy,_and_paste

Nice catch! And it was on a discussion on the question of "Does anyone know where this idea came from?"

Here's a nice bit:

> I chose Z/X/C/V when I was in charge of the user interface design of Apple's Lisa. In addition to their adjacency on the keyboard, I wanted them to have mnemonic value: "X" a cross-out; "V" an inverted caret or proofreader's arrowhead; "C" the first letter of "copy"; the strokes of "Z" tracing a reversal followed by a new path forward. -- Larry Tesler

> Correction: Apparently, my memory was incorrect. The Lisa user interface seems to have used "U" for Undo. On the Mac (as in Gypsy), "U" was and is for Underline. I do not know who chose "Z" for Mac Undo, or why. I suspect that its proximity to the Command key was the reason. -- Larry Tesler

There's more, but it's too much to insert here.

I'm just hoping this isn't someone posing as Larry Tesler.

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