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Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

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Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#13
post #6

It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.

It's a good reminder, that everything had to be invented at some point in time.

Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...

Re: Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

#16
post #9

Larry Tesler was a great figure in computing history, but why is this being reposted now? "Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe his accomplishments.

Limited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those. They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing strings, etc.

Also, I don't think it particularly counts as an invention as it was heavily used in publishing well before the computer era, and was just shifting to a computing context and re-using the same metaphor. For a long time, text was printed in sections, physically cut up and pasted to a board, and when the entire page was assembled it was photographed to create a negative that was used to print the newspaper.

Just to be clear that I'm not intending to disrespect his work, just arguing the semantic meaning of "invention" with respect to this. His obsession with mode-less user interfaces and user-facing simplicity is far more significant a contribution to society in general (and ironically, cut-and-paste is almost the antithesis of his main philosophy as the once-cut data becomes hidden state - it'd be a better metaphor to highlight the data and physically move it around the document).

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