Somewhere in Bangladesh right now a student is being scolded for copy-pasting an assignment, a clerk is pasting a reference number into a form and a designer is moving a paragraph three lines down. The command they are all using is so basic that it seems to have no author. It has one. Larry Tesler, born in New York on 24 April 1945, invented cut, copy and paste — and, more importantly, the idea behind them.
Xerox PARC, 1973
Tesler studied computer science at Stanford in the 1960s and in 1973 joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the laboratory where the graphical user interface, the mouse-driven desktop, Ethernet and the laser printer were all worked out years before anyone sold them. Computers then were operated through typed commands and modes: in a text editor you were either in “insert mode” or “command mode”, and the same keystroke did different things depending on which — a design that produced a constant stream of errors from people who had forgotten where they were. Tesler considered modes a cruelty. His car’s number plate said NO MODES.
Gypsy
With his colleague Tim Mott he built Gypsy, one of the first graphical text editors, around that conviction. In Gypsy you selected text by dragging over it with the mouse and then did something to it — and the three things most worth doing became cut, copy and paste, named after the scissors-and-glue method that typesetters used to rearrange printed columns. The genius was that the user never had to enter a special state to do it. Select, act, done.
Apple, and everywhere
In 1980 Steve Jobs persuaded Tesler to leave Xerox for Apple, where he stayed 17 years. He was central to the Lisa, which shipped cut, copy and paste in 1983, and then to the first Macintosh, which put them under the ⌘ key where they remain. From there they went into Windows, every word processor, every phone. The Newton, Apple’s first handheld, was his too. Later stints at Amazon, Yahoo and 23andMe were about the same thing: making the machine adapt to the person rather than the reverse.
Why it matters
Tesler died on 16 February 2020, at 74. His obituaries called him the inventor of copy and paste, which is true and undersells him. The larger legacy is the principle that software should not punish you for changing your mind — that undo, selection and direct manipulation are rights, not features. Every time a Bangla-typing user on a cheap Android phone highlights a word and taps “copy” without a thought, that is Tesler’s argument, won.
Source: The Verge, via Prothom Alo.
