PULAKRANJAN Chakraborty
Computers and mobile phones have now become an inseparable part of our daily lives.
For those of us who work regularly on computers or smartphones, the cut-copy-paste command is extremely important. Is there any doubt about that?
Have you ever thought, if cut-copy-paste didn’t exist, what our computing life would be like! At home or in the office, while working on computers, how many times do we use this feature, have you ever kept count? Before the 1970s, such commands didn’t exist. The cut, copy, and paste commands were first invented in 1973 at Xerox PARC by a computer scientist named Larry Gordon Tesler.
He was born on April 24, 1945, in New York. In the 1960s, after earning a degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, he joined the technology company Xerox. While working there, Larry Tesler, along with his colleague Tim Mott, developed a text editor called Gypsy. This was one of the first graphical text editors. As part of the Gypsy text editor, they introduced the cut, copy, and paste features. At that time, Tesler’s invention opened a new horizon in the world of computing.
In the 1980s, Apple was the first to bring this feature to its Macintosh computers, making cut-copy-paste simple and accessible for ordinary users. By then, Larry had already left Xerox and joined Apple with the help of Steve Jobs. During his time at Apple, he made many improvements to Macintosh computers. Besides adding the copy-paste feature, the use of the mouse and cursor instead of just typing was also his contribution.
Later, the Windows operating system also adopted these features, making them an essential part of computing. Computers became more user-friendly. It can be said that many fundamental ideas of Graphical User Interface (GUI) and personal computing were born in the hands of Larry Tesler. Apart from Xerox and Apple, he also worked at some of the world’s largest tech companies, including Amazon and Yahoo.
Larry Tesler passed away on February 16, 2020.