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 to have the Newton team ditch its Lisp OS and write one in C++. Larry approached me and a couple of other Lisp hackers and asked us to make a fresh start with Lisp and see what we could do on Newton. We wrote an experimental OS that Matt Maclaurin named "bauhaus".
Larry had a sabbatical coming up right about then. He took it with us. He crammed into a conference room with three or four of us and hacked Lisp code for six weeks. He was a solid Lisp hacker. He stayed up late with us and wrote AI infrastructure for the experimental OS, then handed it off to me when he had to, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on." He hung around with us brainstorming and arguing about ideas. He had us out to his house for dinner.
A little later, when things were hectic and pressure was high on Newton, one of our colleagues killed himself. Larry roamed the halls stopping to talk to people about how they were doing. I was at my desk when he came by, next to another colleague that I considered a friend. Larry stopped by to check on us. My friend had also been a good friend of the fellow who had died, and he lost his composure. Larry grabbed a chair, pulled it up close and sat with him, an arm around him, patting him gently while his grief ran its course.
After Newton was released, Larry moved on to other projects. I worked on the shipped product for a while, but I was pretty burned out. Steve Jobs persuaded me to go to work for NeXT for a little while.
Steve is infamous for being, let's say, not as pleasant as Larry. In fact, he sat in my office once trashing Larry for about half an hour, for no good reason, as far as I can see. I politely disagreed with a number of his points. Larry made important contributions to the development of personal computing, and he didn't have to be a jerk to do it.
Larry was extremely smart, but I never knew him to play I'm-smarter-than-you games. I saw him encourage other people to pursue, develop, and share their ideas. I found him eager to learn new things, and more interested in what good we could do than in who got the credit for it.
We weren't close friends, except maybe when we were crammed in a conference room together for six weeks. I didn't see him much after Newton, though we exchanged the occasional friendly email over the years.
I was just thinking lately that it was about time to say hello to him again. Oops.
Larry Tesler was one of the best people I met in Silicon Valley. He was one of the best people I've met, period. I'll miss him.