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Larry Tesler Has Died

gizmodo.com

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Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#141

Post by mikelevins »

potta_coffee wrote: post #138
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…

Larry sounds like the kind of guy I'd want to know. Also, I didn't know Newton was written in Lisp, that's so cool.

The released one wasn't. Its OS was written in C++ and its apps were written in Newtonscript, which was an interpreted language that loosely resembled Javascript (but well before Javascript was created).

The first Newton OS was written in Lisp (specifically in a dialect called Ralph, which was basically Scheme plus CLOS) over a C++ microkernel.

By the way, that Lisp was written by Apple Cambridge, a group in Apple that was created when Larry arranged for Apple to purchase the assets of Coral Software and hire some of its best hackers to design a new programming language.

Apple later spun out that group to create Digitool, which took with it the code and the rights to Macintosh Common Lisp. Digitool did not prosper, and one of its employees, Gary Byers, negotiated the rights to turn the MCL compiler into an open-source implementation that later became Clozure Common Lisp. So Larry is also responsible for the creation of Clozure Associates and Clozure Common Lisp.

There were some issues with the first Newton OS that led to two developments:

1. John Sculley ordered Larry Tesler to redo the OS in C++. That's the version that shipped.

2. Larry asked me and a few other Lisp hackers to see what we could do on Newton with Ralph. That resulted in the bauhaus OS, which didn't ship.

The authors of the first Newton OS were smart programmers, but they weren't Lisp hackers. Larry speculated that that had something to do with some of the early issues, and maybe it did. I think our version offered some improvements.

Another set of issues had to do with the UI design of the initial OS. Larry was critical of it on the grounds that it was basically trying to be a desktop UI in a handheld device. He thought we should try for a UI experience more suited to a new kind of device, and, in the end, both the shipping OS and the bauhaus OS did what he asked, and were better for it.

(In a final evaluation meeting for bauhaus, our managers told us that we had met and exceeded all goals of our experimental project, but Apple was of course going to ship the OS that the CEO told us to ship, and it was of course not going to ship two OSes for the device. None of this was a surprise to the bauhaus team. We were grateful to have had the support to work on the project for as long as we did, and disappointed that it was over.)

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#142

Post by potta_coffee »

mikelevins wrote: post #141
potta_coffee wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Larry sounds like the kind of guy I'd want to know. Also, I didn't know Newton was written in Lisp, that's so cool.

The released one wasn't. Its OS was written in C++ and its apps were written in Newtonscript, which was an interpreted language that loosely resembled Javascript (but well before Javascript was created). The first Newton OS was written in Lisp (specifically in a dialect called Ralph, which was basically Scheme plus CLOS) over a C++ microkernel. By the way, that Lisp was written by Apple Cambridge, a group in Apple th…

Wow, thanks for sharing that history. It's super interesting. Now I know where CCL came from too - so cool!

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#143

Post by dang »

alankay wrote: post #117

I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland. There is an excellent obit for Larry at: https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocat... ... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his -- in the NYTimes. In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much i…

We've put a link to that article in the title above. (This submission was originally a short text post.)

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#144

Post by buzzert »

linguae wrote: post #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…

Bagel Street Cafe?

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#146

Post by xkriva11 »

jecel wrote: post #95
djrobstep wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

See his article "The Smalltalk Environment" in the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/mode/2up The basic idea is that modes make the same action (pressing the "D" key, for example) do different things. They make things easier for programmers who want many operations on machines that only have a few possible actions, but they make things hard for the user who have to…

It is easy to overlook the biggest source of modes: applications!

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#147

Post by kalberg6429 »

alankay wrote: post #125
oblio wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone from Parc still involved in research these days? Or is everyone retired or just chugging along at regular corporate jobs?

Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research. Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research. But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others. It was a calling, never a job.

"It was a calling, never a job." - This is so heart-warming to read, in a world where the lust for more and more money seems to be so depressingly high at times.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#148

Post by alankay »

Aloha wrote: post #140
alankay wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research. Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research. But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others. It was a calling, never a job.

When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and computing. I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate.

"Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough".

"Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#149

Post by LanceKlass »

This posting and Larry's obit take me back to the math applications class we took at Bronx Science our senior year. Writing a program for the IBM 640 (yes, the 640), coding the IBN cards ourselves and then the fateful experience of loading the program cards into the reader for the 640 was a scary experience. Larry's program apparently did primes while mine did the Fibonacci series. Then the 640, the size of a modern SUV, chugged away all night and the next day it generated voluminous print-out's, lots and lots of paper. What fun!

After graduation he went off to Stamford to continue math - and programming - and I went elsewhere for liberal arts. But no matter, I couldn't have done what Larry did or create what he created.

I remember him as a great guy, very mellow, and if memory serves he was on the track team as well. Perfect for Stanford. Apparently he affected those he worked with the same way he affected me - an easy-going guy, friendly, positive, ready to smile. I know he'll be missed greatly.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#150

Post by Aloha »

alankay wrote: post #148
Aloha wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and computing. I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate. "Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also has a lot of goo…

Thanks! I'll add that one onto my reading queue.

I actually didn't have too much trouble following Dealers, because it (more or less) mostly followed each project separately, which while creating an interspersed timeline in the book, was mostly coherent within each section.

I did read at least part of Fumbling, but I found it a hard book to thread the needle on, and it was in such stark factual disagreement with what else I'd read that I don't recall finishing it.

I know too many who draw the same conclusions from the Alto and related technologies that fumbling does, so I try to get people to read more about PARC, because I'll hope that once they know more they'll draw much the same conclusions I have - My frustration with much of the traditional criticism of Xerox in failing to commercialize the PARC innovations is it completely ignores both the high cost of the technology (it was literally the technology of the future) and the sales culture of technology at the time.

I don't think any large technology company (which Xerox was broadly) could have made something wondrous out of the innovations PARC created because the people who could recognize the value (and use) of this kind of technology were not the people being sold to, or for that matter doing the buying - nor did they have the budgets to buy a Alto, as was later seen with the Star when it came out.

It took direct to consumer sales (allowing department managers to buy stuff), and lower cost products to allow personal computing to penetrate into the home and corporate america - also the traditional criticism completely ignores that the 9700 (and follow on products) paid for the money spent at PARC several times over.

(incidentally, I believe that this sales culture issue is a prime reason why DEC no longer exists as a company because they failed to see that their market was shifting and could no longer be sold thru the same mechanisms they always had been)

In the end, basic research and the undirected applied science that flows from it is important, even if it has no direct tie to your line of business, because it's the innovation that drives a company forward, and frankly drives humanity forward. I wish more people knew that modern interconnected the world we live in was built on billions spent with no firm idea of what would result from them, and how much of a debt we owe to PARC, Bell Labs and others.

Also, thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!

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