The inventor of the hugely popular copy-and-paste computer command died at the age of 74 this week, according to an announcement from the Xerox company posted on Twitter on Wednesday. Lawrence "Larry" Tesler, born in New York in 1945, had spent part of his career with the American printer manufacturer.
"The former Xerox researcher invented cut / copy and paste, find and replace and many other commands," said Xerox. "Your working day is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away on Monday, please join us to honor his memory." A graduate of Stanford University in Silicon Valley in California, Lawrence Tesler specialized in the interactions between humans and machines. He had notably worked for Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and the Xerox research center in Palo Alto.
Hired by Steve Jobs
The ability to "cut" and "paste" a piece of text without going through many complicated steps would have been inspired by a technique prior to the digital age, which consisted in cutting portions of printed sentences and fixing them elsewhere with tape. The order came into being thanks to Apple, which had installed it on the Lisa computer in 1983 and on the Macintosh the following year. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs poached Larry Tesler from Xerox in 1980. The engineer spent 17 years there, gaining the position of chief scientist.
He then created an education start-up and carried out user experience work assignments at Amazon and Yahoo.