Lawrence Gordon Tesler, an American computer scientist whose accomplishments include inventing the cut, copy, and paste, find & replace command, and more, has died at the age of 74.
He died on Monday, February 17. His death was announced on Twitter on Wednesday, February 19, by Xerox, where he spent part of his career.
Xerox tweeted. “The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more, was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas.”
”Larry passed away on Monday, so please join us in celebrating him.”
Mr Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in California. Tesler specialised in human-computer interaction, employing his skills at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo.
The icon of early computing started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people. After graduating, he specialised in user interface design.
He started at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), before Steve Jobs poached him for Apple in 1980, where he spent 17 years and rose to chief scientist. He went on to establish an education startup and did stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.
Thanks to his innovations – including the “cut”, “copy” and “paste” commands – the personal computer became simple to learn and use.