Larry Tesler, Inventor of Cut/Paste, Has Died

His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably:

> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.

[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile and someone young and fast with the same timeouts - this is often impossible)

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article.

Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor.

Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font.

Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.

It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.

My favorite Larry Tesler contribution is Tesler’s Law or the Law of Conservation of Complexity[1].

It answers the question “why does this have to be so complicated?”, which I have found to be useful in countless numbers of UI discussions.

“We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an uncomplicated way.”

Well, it can’t be less complicated than any one of those things then.

https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable...

Larry Tesler was a great figure in computing history, but why is this being reposted now?

"Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe his accomplishments.

Bret Victor - Larry's Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU (~38:08)

> So why haven’t you heard of him?

Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published).

> “And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’”

Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did.

> As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ].

The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M. (he IS a little stiff in this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw

> He even convinced Apple to invest in a newly created company, Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., also in Cambridge, that would produce them.

And that stake was quite possibly crucial in helping Apple survive.

> Plus it's on record that Apple made a total of $1.1 billion out of selling those shares, which represented a profit of 366 times its original investment. That money helped Apple survive, and Jobs decision to cut the Newton — with its ARM processor — was also part of the surgery needed to keep Apple alive.[1]

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...

I've always missed is this X.org behaviour on OSX where you copy just by selecting text and past text by pressing the middle mouse button.

Nice features but I still prefer yank and put.

Related - with a top comment by alankay:

Larry Tesler Has Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 - Feb 2020 (149 comments)

The comments show a lot of confusion about what Tesler invented. Other industries did indeed use cut/copy/paste and older editors had ways to do these functions. But the cursor in these editors normally indicated a character. Larry figured out that if instead the cursor indicated the space between characters and he sometimes had a second such cursor to indicate all characters between them then he could do what previous editors needed various commands with a single operation: replace the selection with what has just been typed and move the cursor to right after that. "paste" would the just the equivalent of retyping a previous selection that had been either "cut" or "copied".

If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then inserting anything more you type. And so on.

Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.

> Tesler registered a strange combination of sensitivity to people and fascination with math. The best career choice the counselor could suggest was working as an architect or maybe becoming a certified public accountant.

A CPA??

Im glad to see that counselors have always been terrible?

I wrote a remembrance when he died a few years back. The timing of this story (2005) is a little unfortunate, because the genius of the Newton investment only showed itself later, even with its failure: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-inve...

See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave Apple an inside line/competitive advantage with ARM that we’re still seeing today, it also meant that Apple owned ARM stock—and could sell it. When the company was near its nadir in the late 1990s, it nursed itself back to health by selling shares of ARM.

So even Tesler’s biggest failure was a stroke of genius.

The Mac effectively had a multi-button mouse. It's just that the mode shift buttons were on the keyboard.

RIP.

The one button mouse was significantly underrated. Using the keyboard keys as modifier keys to the mouse was ergonomically great, and anybody who complains about the mouse seems to never really understand how that system worked.

Ctrl C, Ctrl V 1946. Ctrl X 2020.

Different people's brains work differently, essentially innately. And skilled trained brains work differently than the same brain did green. It doesn't seem that Tesler's work ever reflected these important details about the world.

I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough of his!)

What you see is what I get

“no modes”, i’ve always considered that to be a bit of a mantra worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on).

yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!

RIP to a legend!

WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get" that refers to software which allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.

... For anyone else who didn't want to look it up.

Discussed at the time:

Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com) 1346 points on Feb 19, 2020 | 155 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282

Edit: Original URL updated from BBC obit to IEEE post so this is a bit of a non sequitur now.

(2020)

(2020) and a shit article.

Better -

https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men

He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the 70's.

BBC wrongly somewhat implies Cut/Paste was 80s, in the post computing invention era.

What a sad story.

Larry Tesler: Computer scientist behind cut, copy and paste dies aged 74

Just as others have pointed out that cut-and-paste was a term around a long time before this reference, so too was WYSIWYG. The Dramatics had a top popular song in 1971[0] using the same phrase as its title (albeit spelled slightly differently).

I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented" the term "desktop", or "folder".

[0]https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-Whatcha-...