Posted on 02/21/2020 7:02:49 AM PST by Red Badger
BBC- Larry Tesler, an icon of early computing, has died at the age of 74. Mr Tesler started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people. It was thanks to his innovations - which included the "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands - that the personal computer became simple to learn and use.
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RIP Larry Tesler: The Man That Invented Cut, Copy, And Paste On The Computer. Ernie Banks once said "The measure of a man is in the lives he's touched". Which means Larry Tesler is pretty much one of the most legendary humans on the planet. It doesn't matter if you are a kid plagiarizing your way through school, a cube monkey crushing formulas on Excel spreadsheets, or just the run of the mill lazy person on the internet that doesn't feel like typing.
Hearing Tesler passed away CTRL-X'd my heart out and I imagine this news did the same to countless others. There is no way Barstool Sports makes it as a company let alone a company valued at $450 million dollars without the Copy & Paste feature that has been used for roughly a zillion blogs. If you think us idiots are bad at typing words that come from our brains, you don't even want to know how bad we would do transcribing a story without CTRL-C and CTRL-V teaming up to effortlessly move paragraphs around like a Wade-to-LeBron dunk.
Chris Bosh is obviously CTRL-X in this comparison
The fact that Tesler invented Find and Replace as well yet it didn't even make it into the opening paragraph of the articles discussing his death lets you know the kind of titan of the industry we lost because I legitimately felt like a wizard the first time I used the Replace function.
So RIP In Peace to Larry Tesler, a true legend of the computer world ipso facto the internet world ipso facto the human world that saved countless hand muscles and careers that required even a moderate amount of typing as pretty much the Tommy John of computers. Which is why I am officially inducting Larry as the 2nd member of the Human Hall of Fame that I created, with the only other member being Eli Manning.
LOL!!!
This is a sentiment I heartily agree with many times a day (especially the part about auto fill/correct/spell).
Mr. Tesler (autocorrected to Feeler on first input):
Despite my moderate to severe carpal tunnel syndrome (brought on by years and years of typing reports as a defense analyst), I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your invention of the copy, cut, and paste functions. They helped me to do work that would have taken hours and days in just seconds or minutes and thereby permitted this office drone to have a successful marriage, family life, educate my children, and save enough to retire. I’m sure many others, upon thoughtful reflection, will also realize how much your inventiveness helped them as well.
Well done, sir. Well done.
Rest In Peace, confident in the knowledge that your contributions to the world did improve people’s lives and will continue to do so for many generations to come.
Journey well.
illustrator Kevan Atteberry invented “Clippy”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504767/tragic-life-clippy-worlds-most-hated-virtual-assistant
#6 Microsoft invented ‘Windows” and people have been cursoring ever since... : )
Yup! And from that came the best early computer game — PONG!
#40 Krita is free and pretty good.
https://krita.org/en/
I got my undergrad at NC State University where one of our professors was the guy who invented CTRL-ALT-DEL.
another interesting telling of the Jobs visit to PARC...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth
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Anyone know the cause of death so young?
Thanks BTerclinger, that is a great article that gets the story absolutely correct. Amazing. Most articles on the Steve Jobs/PARC story try to claim that Apple and Jobs stole the tech from Xerox. It correctly points out that Apple paid for the visits and the ideas they got during the visit through the negotiated pre-IPO stock purchase.
Part of what was not told in the article about the two Apple PARC interaction is that there were two visits, one with just Steve for eight hours, and then the second where Steve brought back his team of about twelve software and hardware engineers a week later for another eight hours. At neither meeting were any of Apple’s people allowed to take notes, photos, or copy any code. The only things they could leave with were ideas and their memories and impressions of what they saw and were told by the PARC scientists and engineers. Another thing not mentioned in most narratives of the PARC visit was that the PARC people also got some ideas from the Apple people in exchange.
I heartily recommend that article to everyone not just for the PARC/Apple visit story but for the general history in it as well. Fascinating.
Nah, it’s since Peanuts. . .
Cut removes what you are copying from it’s current location so you can pasted it elsewhere, while copy leaves it there while you duplicate it elsewhere,
Thanks, I guess I don’t typical “cut” so I have always used copy.
Yes. I remember that from typing classes in high school in the 1960s. Typewriters were everywhere, along with carbon sheets so you could have copies of your correspondence. Proofreader/editors made notations on the paper, so you could insert a fresh sheet of paper and start all over. Filled many a trashcan typing papers over and over. I still keep a manual typewriter (circa 1946) although never using it once computer printers came along (preferred it to dot matrix printers). My wife was a typist, and worked her way up to being an I.T. manager of a data site. Young people no longer remember rows of data entry clerks pounding away on manual typewriters, but we do.
Only problem I found with that is that if I have copied something by selecting/highlighting a selection and then want to post that over another word or section, then selecting/highlighting the 2nd section results in copying that, so that if I then choose paste then that, the last thing copied, is pasted.
Used often, but if only it worked to undo last action in real life!
In Apache and Libre office word pros, you can created costume keyboard commands (like make F2 do paste unformatted, and Insert to save document).
And with my stiff arthritic finders (more like search and destroy vs. hunt and peck) then to save time and mistakes, I use AutoHotKey to remap CapsLock to ctrl+c (copy) and Esc to ctrl+v (paste) and then NumLock to Esc . And the middle mouse button to cut.
CapsLock::^c
Esc::^v
NumLock::Esc
mbutton::^x)
Thank God for His grace thru others.
And to select a whole page via Ctrl+a, or just a section in it by placing the cursor where you want to start the copy, then holding down the shift key and then placing the cursor where you want the copy to end.
Then you have the many keyboard shortcutsin Windows , and the any you can make, plus those AutoHotKey enables. Thank God for help!
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