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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)

#71

Post by kbolino »

bee_rider wrote: post #66
kps wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you don't have invisible fragile state. However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).

Does anyone actually use cut-and-paste? Copy-paste-delete is the less scary option, right? There’s a reason copy usually gets the C shortcuts I think.

I use cut and paste pretty often. Besides giving visual feedback that the operation actually worked, it also makes it easy to move things around, including between files.

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

#72

Post by sleepybrett »

detourdog wrote: post #54
kps wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you don't have invisible fragile state. However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).

The mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a regular keyboard, and video conferencing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

I love that piano like chorded keyboard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard#/media/File:X...) from the alto. I think it's still and interesting UI concept but I think it should/could be adapted to a foot pedal design, chords would be constrained to 2 inputs though unless maybe two of the inuputs were directly side by side then you could expand to three. Organists know what's up ;)

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

#73

Post by bee_rider »

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article.

Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor.

Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font.

Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.

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

#74

Post by fsckboy »

Different people's brains work differently, essentially innately. And skilled trained brains work differently than the same brain did green. It doesn't seem that Tesler's work ever reflected these important details about the world.

I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough of his!)

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

#75

Post by sleepybrett »

sandworm101 wrote: post #58
namdnay wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes i think it was pretty obvious to anyone reading this article that Larry Tesler did not invent the physical action of cutting and pasting paper

I'm not so sure. The art of typesetting something like a newspaper page doesn't exist for most people. They see oldschool wooden printing press ... big gap ... then bubblejet printers. I know people who think newspapers were somehow silkscreened. The idea that someone in the mid-20th would glue bits of text to a page, which was then transformed into a metal printing plate, is a process most do not appreciate.

Yeah, in the early aughts I had to explain phototypesetting to some students, they just thought everyone used metal type or it's evolution, the typewriter, until the advent of the computer.

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

#76

Post by sleepybrett »

bluGill wrote: post #60
chongli wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I wasn’t very interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts and the like. I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then…

I am not doubting you were productive with it. However that does not make it better, it just makes it what you know. User experience experts have studied this for a long time, and they all conclude that you need more than one button. (there isn't agreement on the best number as there are some trade offs, but one is clearly not enough) The world has a real problem with people arguing what they know is best without any…

I don't think it was about him saying 'one button is optimal for all time always' I think a lot of it was 'this is a whole new paradigm for people who only know the typewriter, let's make it simple for them, down the road when people have adjusted to the simple case, we can make it more elaborate'

Hell at the time when this happened most computer joysticks had only one button, or in the case of one of the popular joysticks at the time, three buttons that were all just wired to one input.

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

#77

Post by layer8 »

bee_rider wrote: post #63
layer8 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.

Cut and paste is a sort of obvious miss, but in general, I think Smartphones benefitted from not taking for granted the features of PDAs. There was always something deeply niche about the things.

There are more misses. For example I found it surprising that they didn’t include a universal “context menu” equivalent (long press would have been obvious) and a universal menu bar equivalent (like Palm OS did). Stuff like this is why we still have an awfully complex and inconsistent UI landscape on mobile.

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

#78

Post by hulitu »

themacguffinman wrote: post #52

His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably: > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every god…

> surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.

surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.

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

#79

Post by sleepybrett »

shortformblog wrote: post #56

I wrote a remembrance when he died a few years back. The timing of this story (2005) is a little unfortunate, because the genius of the Newton investment only showed itself later, even with its failure: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-inve... See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave Apple an inside line/competit…

I have an old messagepad (110) and ran across it a few months back when I was going through some of my storage boxes. Plopped some AA batteries in it and it booted right up.

Still a great user interface and the handwriting recognition still works great (though it is a little slow).

Very much ahead of it's time, the early palm era was such a massive backslide (aside from size and price).

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

#80

Post by qohen »

tom_ wrote: post #45
cubefox wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often the obvious stuff was invented decades ago, but some old people in power persistently refuse to implement into major products. Like the ability to copy multiple things without overwriting the previous entry. Who would ever need that?!

Not before time, this is in windows 11.

Started with Windows 10.
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