Larry Tesler: The Father of Copy-Paste
Many of us get scolded for copying and pasting another friend's writing while doing a class assignment. A very common function command of a computer is cut-copy-paste. The cut-copy-paste command is an integral part of our daily computer and smartphone use. The contribution behind this groundbreaking innovation is made by American computer scientist Lawrence Gordon Tesler.
Larry Tesler was born on April 24, 1945, in New York. He received a degree in computer science from Stanford University in the 1960s. After that, he worked for the world's best technology companies like Xerox, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo. He worked to make computers user-friendly. He entered the job market regularly in the 1970s. Computers were not as readily available or easy to understand as they are today. Due to complex commands and limited graphical interfaces, computers were difficult to use. Larry Tesler started his groundbreaking work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1973. Many computer innovations were made at this research center. Many fundamental ideas of graphical user interfaces and personal computing were born there.
While working at Xerox, Larry Tesler, along with his colleague Tim Mott, created a text editor called Gypsy. It was one of the first graphical text editors. They added the cut, copy, and paste functions to the Gipsy text editor.
Larry Tesler's innovation had a huge impact on the world of technology. Steve Jobs talked Larry Tesler into coming to work for Apple in 1980, and he worked there for about 17 years. While at Apple, he played an important role in the development of the Lisa and the first Macintosh computers. He used the commands to cut, copy, and paste on this computer. The Lisa computer used this command in 1983. The idea of using the cursor for typing was also one of his innovations. Larry Tesler died on February 16, 2020.
