Larry Tesler, Apple staff member who produced cut-and-paste, passes away at 74

Computer researcher and interface expert Larry Tesler, an essential figure at Apple throughout its early years, passed away Monday at the age of 74, according to Apple Insider.

Tesler originated the idea of “cut-copy-paste” throughout his time at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. In the following twenty years at Apple, he would be deeply associated with the interface style of the Lisa, Macintosh and Newton, a precursor to the iPhone.

In 1979, Tesler was appointed to reveal Apple co-founder Steve Jobs around Xerox PARC, consisting of the trip in which Jobs and a couple of other Apple workers got to see Xerox’s Alto computer system in action. The computer system included icons, windows, folders, a mouse, pop-up menus, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) full-screen editor, Ethernet-based regional networking and network-based printing and video games. The idea of “cut, copy and paste” was likewise part of the presentation.

“Steve was very excited and was pacing around the room, and occasionally looking at the screen,” Tesler stated in 2011 at a Churchill Club occasion in San Jose, California. He remembered Jobs’ response as he led them on the item trip. “‘You are sitting on a goldmine. Why aren’t you doing something with this technology… you could change this world.’ It was clear to him that Xerox was never going to do the kind of revolution things he was envisioning.”

The outcome of the conference was that Apple got to see the visual user interface (GUI) that wound up making it into the Mac OS. Jobs likewise convinced Tesler to leave Xerox to go work for Apple the list below year, handling the Lisa applications group.

As Tesler likewise described in 2011, the reality that the conference even got that far can mostly be traced back to an offer made by Xerox’s company advancement group, who at the time was eyeballing Apple as a source of inexpensive hardware production.

“Xerox was facing a lot of competition from Asian companies and copiers when their patents expired. They had higher production costs. But at the same time they had PARC inventions like the GUI, Ethernet, and improved mice,” Tesler stated at a 2011 remembrance for Jobs. “They started worrying they wouldn’t be able to build them fast enough. They looked at Apple pumping out Apple IIs for real cheap, and thought ‘we should partner with Apple so they can make computers really cheap for us.'”

Tesler left Apple in 1997, proceeding to work as vice president of the shopping experience at Amazon and later on, as head of user experience style and research study at Yahoo. After he left Yahoo, he quickly worked for 23andMe. His ConnectedIn profile states he’s been a semi-retired specialist living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The reason for his death wasn’t right away offered. 

Apple didn’t right away react to an ask for remark.