RIP Larry Tesler

You may have noticed the news that Larry Tesler died a couple of days ago. Larry was part of the early history of Smalltalk and devised the incredibly simple, clever and (thankfully) now pervasive cut/copy/paste idiom for editing. Before that we had the insanity of insert/delete/append 'mode. I know this will seem strange to younger readers but really, it was a revelation in usability.

The probably first widespread explanation of this seminal idea was published in the epochal Byte'81 Smalltalk issue. Happily, that is freely readable at https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1981-08/1981_08_BYTE_06-08_Smalltalk#page/n103/mode/1up

He did plenty of other cool stuff later in life but not many of us can ever hope to improve so many lives with an idea.

tim
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tim Rowledge; [hidden email]; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: SVE: Skip on Vernal Equinox

On 21/02/20 2:13 AM, tim Rowledge wrote:
> You may have noticed the news that Larry Tesler died a couple of days
> ago. Larry was part of the early history of Smalltalk and devised the
> incredibly simple, clever and (thankfully) now pervasive
> cut/copy/paste idiom for editing. Before that we had the insanity of
> insert/delete/append 'mode. I know this will seem strange to younger
> readers but really, it was a revelation in usability.

A few years back, I had an opportunity to watch middle grade students in
remote rural schools use laptops for the first time in their life. The
things that impressed them most was the cut/copy/paste/undo sequence.

LT had really, really impressive foresight and insight for tools to
augment our learning and thinking.

Regards .. Subbu