Silicon Valley regretted this Wednesday the death of the computer pioneer who invented the “cut, copy, paste” command.
Lawrence “Larry” Tesler passed away this week at age 74, according to the Xerox company for which he worked for much of his career.
“The inventor of cutting / copying & pasting, searching & replacing and much more was the former Xerox researcher, Larry Tesler,” the company said on Twitter.
“Your daily work is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away on Monday, so let’s join in celebrating it,” Xerox said.
Graduated from Stanford University, he specialized in the interaction between computers and people, and worked at Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and the Palo Alto Research Center in Xerox.
The cut and paste function was supposedly inspired by the editorial practice of trimming portions of texts and adhering them elsewhere.
“Tesler created the idea of ’cut, copy, & paste’ and combined computer training with a countercultural view that computers should be for everyone,” Silicon’s computer history museum said Wednesday on its Twitter account Valley.
The command invented by Tesler was popularized by Apple after incorporating it in 1983 to the Lisa computer and the Macintosh that was released the following year.
Tesler joined Apple in 1980 after company co-founder Steve Jobs went to Xerox.
At Apple he worked for 17 years and became the chief scientist of the company.
– .
