Larry Tesler, the father of cut, copy, paste, has died

Gareth Branwyn 1:39 pm Wed Feb 19, 2020

Larry Tesler, the Xerox PARC computer scientist who coined the terms cut, copy, and paste, has died.

Born in 1945 in New York, Tesler went on to study computer science at Stanford University, and after graduation he dabbled in artificial intelligence research (long before it became a deeply concerning tool) and became involved in the anti-war and anti-corporate monopoly movements, with companies like IBM as one of his deserving targets. In 1973 Tesler took a job at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he worked until 1980. Xerox PARC is famously known for developing the mouse-driven graphical user interface we now all take for granted, and during his time at the lab Tesler worked with Tim Mott to create a word processor called Gypsy that is best known for coining the terms “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” when it comes to commands for removing, duplicating, or repositioning chunks of text.

Read the rest of his obit on Gizmodo.

[H/t Jim Leftwich]

Image: Yahoo! Blog from Sunnyvale, California, USA – Larry Tesler Smiles at Whisper, CC BY 2.0, Link

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