![]() From Xerox PARC to Apple, Amazon, Yahoo, and others, his contribution to the human/machine interface has been significant. Looking over the stops along the way of Tesler’s career is like reviewing a timeline of the history of personal computing. Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum says Tesler “combined computer science training with a counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone.” The only question is: who will have to deal with it-the user, the application developer, or the platform developer.” His answer, throughout his career, was design the machine for the user, not the engineers. “Every application has an inherent almost irreducible complexity. In 1984, while working at Apple, Tesler published Tesler’s Law of Conservation of Complexity. But those were only two of the items produced in Tesler’s long career directed by a singular principle: “When you think it’s as simple as it can be, there is probably a way to make it even simpler.” Most obituaries noted that he was the inventor of the copy, cut, and paste and search/replace commands for PC text-writing programs. Larry Tesler passed away on Monday, February 17, 2020. According to Wikipedia, “Immediately after returning to Apple’s headquarters, (Jobs) set his team on creating a similar graphical user interface for their first product, the Apple Lisa.” About the Apple contingent, he later told journalist Stephen Levy that “no other outsiders had so quickly grasped that a new paradigm in computing was operating at PARC.” Evidence of the impression that was made that day surfaced in Apple’s Lisa computer followed by the first Macintosh the company produced. The guide assigned by Xerox to demonstrate the system was Larry Tesler, a computer scientist who was a strong believer in the future of PCs as well as this new graphical user input (GUI) design. Among the Apple visitors that day was cofounder Steve Jobs, who clearly recognized the power of this revolutionary interface. It would become apparent to the visitors not too long afterward that personal computing would take a dramatic course correction away from typed machine instructions on a command line to a metaphorical desktop featuring a soap-bar-shaped “mouse” sending instructions to a bitmapped screen that had frames that resembled windows.
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