Larry Tesler, Father Of 'Copy' And 'Paste' Breathed His Last At 74

Sadly, the creator of ‘cut, copy and paste’ functions that help you use the computer and smartphone with ease - Lawrence “Larry” Tesler breathed his last at the age of 74.

In the 80s, together with Tim Mort, who is a colleague at Palo Alto Research Center, Tesler invented a series of commands for the computer system. They came up with this idea when they were working on Gypsy, which was a word processor that could store, manipulate and format the text typed on a computer. At that period of time, based on the huge computers’ need for dedicated devices to operate text-editing, they utilized Gypsy’s development to realize their idea of ‘Copy and Paste’ commands for the graphic user interface (GUI).

Being a pioneer in developing easy access for users, Larry Tesler was among the scientists who strongly supported the modeless interface and users’ convenient accessibility with GUI. It is similar to the Dark Mode that is crazily popular in our modern society, and it needs setting and toggling through hardware or software for a computer. The Caps Lock key is a feature that requires the same setting. Both Tesler and Mort expected their brainchildren would be available to computer users at all times, and it really comes nowaday.

When being developed at PARC for Xerox, GUI was shown to Steve Jobs while he was visiting the company. The late founder of Apple owed his inspiration from the technology which brought about the development of Lisa with the same GUI and notably the Macintosh. After working at PARC, Larry Tesler also devoted himself to Apple, Amazon, Yahoo! and 23andMe. In collaboration with Steve Jobs at Apple, he studied the Macintosh and Lisa which were included in the list of the first computers that features the “copy” and “paste” functions.