17 ms·

Larry Tesler Has Died

1346 points by drallison 7y ago

Larry Tesler has died. Larry was in the middle of many of the most influential of Silicon Valley projects and an insightful contributor. See his Wikipedia biography for a snapshot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler

falcor84 7y ago
I couldn't find any corroboration of this. What happened?
- mindcrime 7y ago
  https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-showed-steve-jobs-around-xerox-parc-dies-aged-74 https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-...
suyash 7y ago
RIP Larry Tesler, I ran into him a few times at meetup events in Bay Area, few people knew who he was as he kept a very low profile.
- dbg31415 7y ago
  I met him at a meetup I went to out in SF while traveling for work. I didn't know anyone there, just going to kill time. I had no idea who he was just someone willing to chat with me for an hour or so. I started asking him what he did, and it was clear he wasn't there to talk about himself. Just struck me as a really cool, really humble, really approachable guy. With a lot of good ideas, and a passion for spreading curiosity. World needs more people like this, not less.
briancof 7y ago
$TSLERQ
musicale 7y ago
Very sad, Larry Tesler was brilliant and an inspiration. Smalltalk, copy-and-paste, the Apple Lisa/Macintosh and Newton, Object Pascal (predecessor of Delphi), Stagecast Creator... NO MODES. ;-) Pretty sure there isn't any bit of personal computing that Larry Tesler couldn't (or didn't) help make better somehow.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
I am sorry to hear that. I once had lunch with him and John Koza (pioneer in genetic programming) around the 1994 time period. Larry had the first book I wrote (Common Lisp book for Springer Verlag) and in a good natured way was trying to talk me into writing a book on Dylan. We kept in touch but I didn’t write a Dylan book. Talking with him and John for an hour was like getting a year’s worth of good ideas tossed at you, all at once.
Scobleizer 7y ago
Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today. Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone. Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more. Huge losses for our industry.
- smarky0x7CD 7y ago
  Also Peter Montgomery. Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and secure elliptic curve cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me. Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that window by a few hours.
    - jose-cl 7y ago
      Keep studying for him, cheers
tobr 7y ago
Larry Tesler was really convinced of the merits of modeless interfaces. He even got “NOMODES” on his license plate. https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-interactions-review-part-1/ https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-intera...
- hawflakes 7y ago
  Was at 23andME when he was there, too. We (engineering) had no idea who he was initially but I did notice his license plate "NO MODES." Only after we looked him up and found that he had invented copy-paste did we realize he was a living legend. Sad to see he's passed on.
loquor 7y ago
I remember his mention in Bret Victor's talk, Inventing on Principle. He is known for cut copy paste, but he did far more than that. He introduced a single 'mode' for working for docs, as opposed to having typing, editing, formatting modes. He lived his entire life by the 'nomodes' ethos; that's his twitter handle to boot. I really respect that.
Stratoscope 7y ago
Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young. We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years. Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE, complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend made for him: DON'T MODE ME IN https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/... A couple of other good articles: https://gizmodo.com/1841787408 https://gizmodo.com/1841787408 https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b910429f12eb https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b91...
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campercoder 7y ago
Programmers die way too young. We need to chill out, code less, walk more. Or we need ways to code while walking.
dmazin 7y ago
He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1] NO MODES! https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes.jpg https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes... [1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions (http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler)
- jolmg 7y ago
  The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have this bit that's cited to that book: > Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text. I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers to vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save as if killed", and yank. I wonder what other editors had back then, before the names he came up with became standardized. I also wonder how the idea of the operations developed before Larry Tesler contributed to it. Looking at POSIX[2], it seems ex has delete, yank, and put, but I can't see similar functionality in standard ed (GNU's ed does have yank, but I guess it's an extension). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Popularization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz... [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
  - jcynix 7y ago
    There's more than emacs or vi in "editor history" e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 and follow-ups at Xerox PARC.
  - fsckboy 7y ago
    TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end of line" or "n lines back/forward from cursor" TECO commands were typed in as code, essentially, and that code could also be saved and run as macros. it was extremely powerful, such that emacs was originally written as TECO Edit MACros.
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aresant 7y ago
A career in full from his own CV: "Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500 corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers, designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products." http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf
- musicale 7y ago
  Honest but overly modest summary. I picture hiring managers or AI throwing his resumé away because he didn't have enough experience and was "out of date." The Apple and Xerox segments are nothing short of astonishing.
- nl 7y ago
  ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) Holdings, ltd Cambridge, England (co-founder) Championed the spinout of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) from Acorn plc and served on ARM’s board for 13 years. That turned out fairly well....
samatman 7y ago
Wow serious Baader-Meinhof effect! I recently downloaded all the PDFs from http://worrydream.com/refs/ http://worrydream.com/refs/, and was reading Larry Tesler's A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste on my flight Monday. It's a good paper, you can find it at the link above if you're in the mood to read it in memoriam.
tus88 7y ago
Surprised I have not heard of him. He seems quite significant.
GuiA 7y ago
A reminder that our industry is very young still, and many who laid its foundations are still with us today, but won’t be forever. There is no better time than now for collecting oral history, interviewing people, asking them about their stories, etc. All of this knowledge and stories can get lost very very fast.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  And, pretty basic, but thank them for their contribution. Plenty of the stuff we take for granted should not be taken for granted at all, it took a lot of dedicated people working on machines that were severely limited to give us the luxuries we have today and believe that it has always been so. It wasn't.
- deleted 7y ago
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pgt 7y ago
I loved Larry Tesler’s work. No modes!
gdubs 7y ago
Sad news; total legend. folklore.org has a lot of stories featuring Larry — short stories on an era of computing that has faded around the edges. RIP.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
I think you guys dehumanize these people by reducing them to one or two sentences about computers. You havent lost this man. You didnt even know him.
- Shebanator 7y ago
  Some of us actually did know him. I did, albeit not as well as others here, and I see no harm and much good in people celebrating his accomplishments in his chosen career.
- mindcrime 7y ago
  You don't necessarily need to know someone personally to feel a sense of loss. You can feel a "bond" with with someone based on all sorts of things: being members of a common community, sharing a common occupation, etc., etc. To illustrate one case that hits close to home for me... when I think about the 343 firefighters who were killed on 9/11, I find it difficult not to tear up at times. Even though I never met any of them, and couldn't tell you any of their names. But we shared a common bond, by virtue of being firefighters. My sense of loss at their death is rooted in how deeply I admire all of them for the bravery and courage they displayed on that day, putting their lives on the line in the name of saving others. Do I feel that as strongly as if I had been the literal biological sibling of one them? Possibly not, but they were still my brothers, and the sense of loss is still real.
- mturmon 7y ago
  Without piling on: sometimes this is how you get to know someone. It used to be interesting to scan the obit section of newspapers, just to see the parade of characters and achievements that I had missed or not known enough of.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the discussion both productive and quite civil! I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thought he was one of her co-workers because the discussion was very peer to peer as opposed to top down. She corrected me to point out he was one of the movers and shakers at PARC. That left a very positive impression on me. He was also "the other Larry" at Xerox. Larry Garlick, who was also "Larry" to most people, was also at XBS (as was Eric Schmidt) and later followed Eric over to Sun.
- mrandolph 7y ago
  Which side of the debate was he on personally?
  - troymc 7y ago
    I'm guessing Emacs, because vi has modes and he was not a fan of modes.
  - ilaksh 7y ago
    I'm not sure that debate was really important since it's clear that his real answer was 'none of the above'.
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    He was very much in favor of modeless design, which emacs is much closer to than vi is. My argument was that emacs still has modes, operationally. You can make it a debugger, a mail reader, or a text editor by invoking code that puts it in that "mode." So the discussion quickly becomes what is meant by 'mode' and how are operational modes different than semantic modes which are different than presentation modes. If you haven't guessed it was pretty memorable for me, it helped me see some insights into the difference between design and engineering.
- haeberli 7y ago
alariccole 7y ago
This breaks my heart. I used to work next to Larry—literally sat next to him—on Yahoo’s central design team. We were in frequent meetings together, but didn’t talk one-on-one often. One evening commuting from work, during one of many Caltrain failures, he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home. I remember sitting nervously in the car, a bit awestruck, and I finally got up the courage to ask him “Did you really invent copy and paste?!” “Yes.” From then on the ice was broken and we chatted more freely: fun discussions about the (then) up-and-coming voice recognition UIs (I compared them to CLIs which he liked), wearables, design, and cycling. I consider him a friend. Didn’t expect us to lose him so soon.
- alariccole 7y ago
  To clarify, as the dialogue could be construed otherwise, Larry was actually very humble. While he was not as famous as he should have been, he had so much influence on the industry, it could easily go to your head. He was very approachable and helpful, and overall a generous and kind person. Will be sorely missed.
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    It’s ok, I think anyone would realise that the fact he gave you a lift meant he was a pretty nice guy. I really enjoyed reading your story. I’m sorry you lost a friend.
- jusujusu 7y ago
  > he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home Ctrl-X + Ctrl-V
atdrummond 7y ago
Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent. In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled with networking gear I desperately needed for a “M”MORPG game I was building. The return label read “53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50”. In the game, players were elves scrambling to defeat a corrupted workshop. The final boss was S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ Santa himself. It was only when I was older that I appreciated that he had probably sent me thousands of dollars worth of gear (and not in 2020 dollars!) in addition to the invaluable advice he provided, sometimes (frankly, often) unsolicited but always direct and always thought provoking. While I never did become an extremely competent commercial developer, to this day I enjoy programming for programming’s own sake. Larry’s push for me to fix my own headaches, rather than simply giving me a metaphorical aspirin, resulted in my development of solutions for small hobby problems that it appeared often only myself and perhaps a few others shared. As it turns out, in spite of (or thanks to) my niche interests, my curiosity and the method of targeted problem solving Larry fostered set me on a path I remain on today. Frankly, his contributions helped mold me as a man more than those of any other mentor of mine; that is absolutely meant as a compliment to his prescient pedagogy, rather than a slight at my life’s many other wonderful influences. I’ve sold a few businesses thanks to Larry’s problem solving approach. The rest I founded are running profitably - and somehow I’ve never lost an investor money. My customers have always, above all else, been happy because they had their problems fixed. (Or, perhaps thanks to his influence, their happiness stemmed from my teams simply providing them with the tools they needed to solve their own problems!) And because I followed Larry’s personal advice, I have been able to spend every day for nearly two decades doing what he encouraged and what has consistently engaged me: finding, isolating and destroying problems. Thank you for everything.
- zymhan 7y ago
  Wow, that is quite the gesture.
- zarmin 7y ago
  Great story, thanks for sharing.
ColinWright 7y ago
Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558
jakelazaroff 7y ago
Tangentially related question: is this why HN currently has a black bar above the navigation? To commemorate his death?
- donarb 7y ago
  Yes, people of significance in computing are honored this way.
- penagwin 7y ago
  Yes, HN does this when people who were impactful to the technology world have died to commemorate them.
linguae 7y ago
I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news. The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism. With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about advancing the state of research in the areas of programming languages, systems software, and human-computer interaction. There were many great people that were part of this group, including Larry Tesler and Don Norman. I completely understand why Steve Jobs shut down this group in 1997; times were rough for Apple, and the company couldn't afford to do research when its core business was in dire straits. But I wish Apple revived this group when its fortunes changed, and I also wish Apple still had the focus on usability and improving the personal computing experience that it had in the 1980s and 1990s.
- mikelevins 7y ago
  Larry was influential in the development and the missions of both ATG and the Human Interface Group, both of which are now gone now. He believed in conducting practical experiments with users and collecting objective measurements of how well UI worked. He wanted to find general principles that could be used to make all software better for everyone. Steve Jobs killed both ATG and HIG. I think your point about times being rough and money being tight are valid, but three years earlier Steve Jobs sat in my office at NeXT and told me that if it was up to him, Apple would kill ATG and HIG--not because they were expensive, but because, in his words, they had too much influence. Sure enough, when he took over Apple again, he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself. You're probably right that cutting those expenses was important to Apple's recovery. I think your other point is right, too, though: we'd be better off if Apple--or somebody--reconstituted something like HIG to show the industry what's possible if you take user experience and human-computer interaction seriously. Unfortunately, Larry can't help us with it this time.
  - audiometry 7y ago
    "he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself." ooh ouch that's a sharp, and understated, line!
dreamcompiler 7y ago
I'm very sorry to hear this. He was the instigator of Dylan and it's not wrong to say there would be no Clozure Common Lisp (my preferred development platform) today if not for Larry Tesler.
burnJS 7y ago
Don't mode me bro.
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dazrafio 7y ago
So long our dear friend Larry. You have been such an inspiration. Amongst other achievements, the Newton is still such an incredible machine (and love Dylan)
kristianp 7y ago
There's one thing on his wikipedia page which I think is probably wrong: I don't think Wirth had any involvement with Object Pascal.
- jdswain 7y ago
  I think he did, as a consultant. The main reference I found was an article in MacTech, written by an Apple employee: "Object Pascal is an extension to the Pascal language that was developed at Apple in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal." http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/Ob...
  - haeberli 7y ago
    I was (distantly) there, and I recall Wirth being there and visiting.
mikelevins 7y ago
I met Larry in about 1992 when I went to work on the Newton project. I had seen him around Apple before, and I knew who he was and what he was known for, but I didn't actually meet him until I joined the Newton team. I found him friendly, modest, smart, shrewd, compassionate, full of interesting knowledge and ideas, and interested in other people and their ideas. I got to know him better when John Sculley ordered him to have the Newton team ditch its Lisp OS and write one in C++. Larry approached me and a couple of other Lisp hackers and asked us to make a fresh start with Lisp and see what we could do on Newton. We wrote an experimental OS that Matt Maclaurin named "bauhaus". Larry had a sabbatical coming up right about then. He took it with us. He crammed into a conference room with three or four of us and hacked Lisp code for six weeks. He was a solid Lisp hacker. He stayed up late with us and wrote AI infrastructure for the experimental OS, then handed it off to me when he had to, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on." He hung around with us brainstorming and arguing about ideas. He had us out to his house for dinner. A little later, when things were hectic and pressure was high on Newton, one of our colleagues killed himself. Larry roamed the halls stopping to talk to people about how they were doing. I was at my desk when he came by, next to another colleague that I considered a friend. Larry stopped by to check on us. My friend had also been a good friend of the fellow who had died, and he lost his composure. Larry grabbed a chair, pulled it up close and sat with him, an arm around him, patting him gently while his grief ran its course. After Newton was released, Larry moved on to other projects. I worked on the shipped product for a while, but I was pretty burned out. Steve Jobs persuaded me to go to work for NeXT for a little while. Steve is infamous for being, let's say, not as pleasant as Larry. In fact, he sat in my office once trashing Larry for about half an hour, for no good reason, as far as I can see. I politely disagreed with a number of his points. Larry made important contributions to the development of personal computing, and he didn't have to be a jerk to do it. Larry was extremely smart, but I never knew him to play I'm-smarter-than-you games. I saw him encourage other people to pursue, develop, and share their ideas. I found him eager to learn new things, and more interested in what good we could do than in who got the credit for it. We weren't close friends, except maybe when we were crammed in a conference room together for six weeks. I didn't see him much after Newton, though we exchanged the occasional friendly email over the years. I was just thinking lately that it was about time to say hello to him again. Oops. Larry Tesler was one of the best people I met in Silicon Valley. He was one of the best people I've met, period. I'll miss him.
bobbiechen 7y ago
Rest in peace. It's incredible how young computing is, many of his contributions are so fundamental. From a guest lecture Larry Tesler gave at CMU in 2014 [1]: Click to select an insertion point. Double click to select a word. Click and drag to select a passage. All of those were new. Type to replace the selection by new text [...] I think that was not unprecedented, but it wasn’t common. Cut to move the selection to a buffer, Pentti Kanurva had done it, tvedit. Paste to replace the selection by the buffer. Again, Pentti had done that [...] Control B to bold the selection, I and U and so on [...] All of these things were introduced in Gypsy, 1975. Gypsy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) [1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e6adfb43-be90-46b3-9009-23cd98b7a898 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
bsimpson 7y ago
I've been meaning to watch one of his presentations for a while: "Origins of the Apple Human Interface" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4
mc3 7y ago
I'm bad at names, so I didn't know the name, but followed the Wikipedia link and saw he was the "modeless" advocate, and I learned about that from this awesome Bret Victor talk: https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366. Someone has commented to forward to 38 minutes to hear it. That Bret Victor talk still influences me today, so please watch it I think it'll help you if you haven't watched it already.
davidhariri 7y ago
I didn’t know of Larry Tesler, but reading the comments makes me want to lead like he did. Looking forward to learning more about his life. My condolences to his friends here.
marai2 7y ago
From his resume: 1962-1964 Stanford University Departments of Genetics and Computer Science programmer
svat 7y ago
In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways: - It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf - Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/scribe https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/... Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).
OrgNet 7y ago
https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png
yters 7y ago
Wow reading the comments sounds like actually a great human being. Help me realize being a jerk is an anti pattern, even though I am sometimes tempted to think otherwise.
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
Does anyone else find it strange that there’s rarely any mention of cause of death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  Sometimes it's mentioned, sometimes the family prefers privacy. It's not uncouth to ask, but it's good to respect that privacy if the family does not share the cause of death.
- pmcjones 7y ago
  Markoff's obituary [1] in the New York Times says, "The cause was not known, his wife, Colleen Barton, said, but in recent years he had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle...
justlexi93 7y ago
Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist. He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.
kianigreycliff 7y ago
rest in peace
ckaps 7y ago
What
sheri 7y ago
I was in college, and attended a career fair for Amazon back in 2002. I was not in my last year so I really went just for free food. It was quite sparse, and after a while one guy with a friendly smile just walked up to me and said "Hi, I'm Larry". We talked a little bit about my background, about Amazon and opportunities there. I felt like I was a hotshot at the time, and quite frankly didn't. Only after I went back to my dorm and looked him up did I realize who I was talking to. He was super humble, super nice. I acted like a jerk, thinking I was hot stuff and everybody was there to court me and was there just for free pizza. Despite being infinitely more accomplished than I could ever be, he was nice, engaging and never treated me in kind. Every so often I think back to that time and kick myself at the lost opportunity to have a conversation with one of the legends of Silicon Valley. Thank you Larry.
astatine 7y ago
RIP Larry Tesler. I rather feel a worm for not being aware of him till today. Nevertheless, hearing the many personal stories here on HN of his work, humility and graciousness, make me thankful for him and his tribe that have made the software profession so much more richer.
spullara 7y ago
One of the strangest moments in my career was Larry asking me for career advice when we were both at Yahoo; I think because I had been an IC for really long time and had figured out how to leverage that into strategic positions. Great man with incredible accomplishments.
alankay 7y ago
I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland. There is an excellent obit for Larry at: https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408 https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocat... ... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his -- in the NYTimes. In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much influence in too many areas for there to be any chance to characterize him technically. In short, he was a superb wide-spectrum(real) computer scientist who was also a very talented and skilled programmer. His passing was sudden and unexpected, and I may return later to this note to add more details of his rich career. For now, I remember him as great to work with in all aspects of his life. He was a great guy, and perhaps that sums him up as best as can be.
- oblio 7y ago
  Is anyone from Parc still involved in research these days? Or is everyone retired or just chugging along at regular corporate jobs?
  - alankay 7y ago
    Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research. Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research. But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others. It was a calling, never a job.
    - danmaz74 7y ago
      > Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Metcalfe?
      - impeachgod 7y ago
        I think Alan Kay is referring to Charles Simonyi. According to Forbes, his net worth is $4.3 billion: https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/
daianamadalina 7y ago
Hello! Has anyone seen a site similar to this? https://www.compartirespacios.com/listing/alquiler-estudios-baratos-madrid/ https://www.compartirespacios.com/listing/alquiler-estudios-...
daianamadalina 7y ago
Hello! Has anyone seen a site similar to this? https://www.compartirespacios.com/listing/alquiler-estudios-baratos-madrid/ https://www.compartirespacios.com/listing/alquiler-estudios-...
mister_hn 7y ago
Never heard about him here in EU
netuser1 7y ago
Thank you, Larry.
billman 7y ago
Wow. I didn't realize how influential the Bronx High School of Science was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_Science_alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_S...
lukaserat 7y ago
:(
dkonofalski 7y ago
Is it possible for the HN staff to put a rollover on the black bar or link it to threads like this. I see an uptick in the "why is there a black bar?" threads every time it goes up and it would be nice to acknowledge the people that have contributed to technology and spread awareness of what they've done for people that might not know.
bandrami 7y ago
Larry Tesler has died (gizmodo.com) 1179 points by drallison 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | web | favorite | 131 comments
LanceKlass 7y ago
This posting and Larry's obit take me back to the math applications class we took at Bronx Science our senior year. Writing a program for the IBM 640 (yes, the 640), coding the IBN cards ourselves and then the fateful experience of loading the program cards into the reader for the 640 was a scary experience. Larry's program apparently did primes while mine did the Fibonacci series. Then the 640, the size of a modern SUV, chugged away all night and the next day it generated voluminous print-out's, lots and lots of paper. What fun! After graduation he went off to Stamford to continue math - and programming - and I went elsewhere for liberal arts. But no matter, I couldn't have done what Larry did or create what he created. I remember him as a great guy, very mellow, and if memory serves he was on the track team as well. Perfect for Stanford. Apparently he affected those he worked with the same way he affected me - an easy-going guy, friendly, positive, ready to smile. I know he'll be missed greatly.
Xavier45 7y ago
Bet
alankay 7y ago
A very nice remembrance by John Markoff in the NYTimes: https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9uOwZooDufhaU?reason=invalid_cred https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9u...
- neonate 7y ago
  That link doesn't work for me, but these do: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle... http://archive.md/J7bOw http://archive.md/J7bOw
  - alankay 7y ago
    Thanks!
drallison 7y ago
Obits in the national press: NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle... WAPO: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler-inventor-of-copy-and-paste-computer-functions-dies-at-74/2020/02/20/e5699f6e-541c-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler...
Tempora 7y ago
RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.

1346 points by drallison 7y ago

falcor84 7y ago

I couldn't find any corroboration of this. What happened?

mindcrime 7y ago
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-showed-steve-jobs-around-xerox-parc-dies-aged-74 https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-...

suyash 7y ago

RIP Larry Tesler, I ran into him a few times at meetup events in Bay Area, few people knew who he was as he kept a very low profile.

dbg31415 7y ago
I met him at a meetup I went to out in SF while traveling for work. I didn't know anyone there, just going to kill time. I had no idea who he was just someone willing to chat with me for an hour or so. I started asking him what he did, and it was clear he wasn't there to talk about himself. Just struck me as a really cool, really humble, really approachable guy. With a lot of good ideas, and a passion for spreading curiosity. World needs more people like this, not less.

briancof 7y ago

$TSLERQ

musicale 7y ago

Very sad, Larry Tesler was brilliant and an inspiration. Smalltalk, copy-and-paste, the Apple Lisa/Macintosh and Newton, Object Pascal (predecessor of Delphi), Stagecast Creator... NO MODES. ;-) Pretty sure there isn't any bit of personal computing that Larry Tesler couldn't (or didn't) help make better somehow.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

I am sorry to hear that. I once had lunch with him and John Koza (pioneer in genetic programming) around the 1994 time period. Larry had the first book I wrote (Common Lisp book for Springer Verlag) and in a good natured way was trying to talk me into writing a book on Dylan. We kept in touch but I didn’t write a Dylan book. Talking with him and John for an hour was like getting a year’s worth of good ideas tossed at you, all at once.

Scobleizer 7y ago

Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today. Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the iPhone. Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming languages, and much more. Huge losses for our industry.

smarky0x7CD 7y ago
Also Peter Montgomery. Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and secure elliptic curve cryptography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematician) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me. Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that window by a few hours.
  - jose-cl 7y ago
    Keep studying for him, cheers

tobr 7y ago

Larry Tesler was really convinced of the merits of modeless interfaces. He even got “NOMODES” on his license plate. https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-interactions-review-part-1/ https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-intera...

hawflakes 7y ago
Was at 23andME when he was there, too. We (engineering) had no idea who he was initially but I did notice his license plate "NO MODES." Only after we looked him up and found that he had invented copy-paste did we realize he was a living legend. Sad to see he's passed on.

loquor 7y ago

I remember his mention in Bret Victor's talk, Inventing on Principle. He is known for cut copy paste, but he did far more than that. He introduced a single 'mode' for working for docs, as opposed to having typing, editing, formatting modes. He lived his entire life by the 'nomodes' ethos; that's his twitter handle to boot. I really respect that.

Stratoscope 7y ago

Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young. We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years. Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE, complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend made for him: DON'T MODE ME IN https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/... A couple of other good articles: https://gizmodo.com/1841787408 https://gizmodo.com/1841787408 https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b910429f12eb https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b91...

deleted 7y ago

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campercoder 7y ago

Programmers die way too young. We need to chill out, code less, walk more. Or we need ways to code while walking.

dmazin 7y ago

He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from all the design history books that I've read that he's a legend.[1] NO MODES! https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes.jpg https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes... [1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions (http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler)

jolmg 7y ago
The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have this bit that's cited to that book: > Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text. I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers to vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save as if killed", and yank. I wonder what other editors had back then, before the names he came up with became standardized. I also wonder how the idea of the operations developed before Larry Tesler contributed to it. Looking at POSIX[2], it seems ex has delete, yank, and put, but I can't see similar functionality in standard ed (GNU's ed does have yank, but I guess it's an extension). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Popularization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz... [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
- jcynix 7y ago
  There's more than emacs or vi in "editor history" e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 and follow-ups at Xerox PARC.
- fsckboy 7y ago
  TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end of line" or "n lines back/forward from cursor" TECO commands were typed in as code, essentially, and that code could also be saved and run as macros. it was extremely powerful, such that emacs was originally written as TECO Edit MACros.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

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aresant 7y ago

A career in full from his own CV: "Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500 corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers, designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products." http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf

musicale 7y ago
Honest but overly modest summary. I picture hiring managers or AI throwing his resumé away because he didn't have enough experience and was "out of date." The Apple and Xerox segments are nothing short of astonishing.
nl 7y ago
ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) Holdings, ltd Cambridge, England (co-founder) Championed the spinout of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) from Acorn plc and served on ARM’s board for 13 years. That turned out fairly well....

samatman 7y ago

Wow serious Baader-Meinhof effect! I recently downloaded all the PDFs from http://worrydream.com/refs/ http://worrydream.com/refs/, and was reading Larry Tesler's A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste on my flight Monday. It's a good paper, you can find it at the link above if you're in the mood to read it in memoriam.

tus88 7y ago

Surprised I have not heard of him. He seems quite significant.

GuiA 7y ago

A reminder that our industry is very young still, and many who laid its foundations are still with us today, but won’t be forever. There is no better time than now for collecting oral history, interviewing people, asking them about their stories, etc. All of this knowledge and stories can get lost very very fast.

jacquesm 7y ago
And, pretty basic, but thank them for their contribution. Plenty of the stuff we take for granted should not be taken for granted at all, it took a lot of dedicated people working on machines that were severely limited to give us the luxuries we have today and believe that it has always been so. It wasn't.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

pgt 7y ago

I loved Larry Tesler’s work. No modes!

gdubs 7y ago

Sad news; total legend. folklore.org has a lot of stories featuring Larry — short stories on an era of computing that has faded around the edges. RIP.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

I think you guys dehumanize these people by reducing them to one or two sentences about computers. You havent lost this man. You didnt even know him.

Shebanator 7y ago
Some of us actually did know him. I did, albeit not as well as others here, and I see no harm and much good in people celebrating his accomplishments in his chosen career.
mindcrime 7y ago
You don't necessarily need to know someone personally to feel a sense of loss. You can feel a "bond" with with someone based on all sorts of things: being members of a common community, sharing a common occupation, etc., etc. To illustrate one case that hits close to home for me... when I think about the 343 firefighters who were killed on 9/11, I find it difficult not to tear up at times. Even though I never met any of them, and couldn't tell you any of their names. But we shared a common bond, by virtue of being firefighters. My sense of loss at their death is rooted in how deeply I admire all of them for the bravery and courage they displayed on that day, putting their lives on the line in the name of saving others. Do I feel that as strongly as if I had been the literal biological sibling of one them? Possibly not, but they were still my brothers, and the sense of loss is still real.
mturmon 7y ago
Without piling on: sometimes this is how you get to know someone. It used to be interesting to scan the obit section of newspapers, just to see the parade of characters and achievements that I had missed or not known enough of.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the discussion both productive and quite civil! I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thought he was one of her co-workers because the discussion was very peer to peer as opposed to top down. She corrected me to point out he was one of the movers and shakers at PARC. That left a very positive impression on me. He was also "the other Larry" at Xerox. Larry Garlick, who was also "Larry" to most people, was also at XBS (as was Eric Schmidt) and later followed Eric over to Sun.

mrandolph 7y ago
Which side of the debate was he on personally?
- troymc 7y ago
  I'm guessing Emacs, because vi has modes and he was not a fan of modes.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  I'm not sure that debate was really important since it's clear that his real answer was 'none of the above'.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  He was very much in favor of modeless design, which emacs is much closer to than vi is. My argument was that emacs still has modes, operationally. You can make it a debugger, a mail reader, or a text editor by invoking code that puts it in that "mode." So the discussion quickly becomes what is meant by 'mode' and how are operational modes different than semantic modes which are different than presentation modes. If you haven't guessed it was pretty memorable for me, it helped me see some insights into the difference between design and engineering.
haeberli 7y ago

alariccole 7y ago

This breaks my heart. I used to work next to Larry—literally sat next to him—on Yahoo’s central design team. We were in frequent meetings together, but didn’t talk one-on-one often. One evening commuting from work, during one of many Caltrain failures, he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home. I remember sitting nervously in the car, a bit awestruck, and I finally got up the courage to ask him “Did you really invent copy and paste?!” “Yes.” From then on the ice was broken and we chatted more freely: fun discussions about the (then) up-and-coming voice recognition UIs (I compared them to CLIs which he liked), wearables, design, and cycling. I consider him a friend. Didn’t expect us to lose him so soon.

alariccole 7y ago
To clarify, as the dialogue could be construed otherwise, Larry was actually very humble. While he was not as famous as he should have been, he had so much influence on the industry, it could easily go to your head. He was very approachable and helpful, and overall a generous and kind person. Will be sorely missed.
- chris_wot 7y ago
  It’s ok, I think anyone would realise that the fact he gave you a lift meant he was a pretty nice guy. I really enjoyed reading your story. I’m sorry you lost a friend.
jusujusu 7y ago
> he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home Ctrl-X + Ctrl-V

atdrummond 7y ago

Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent. In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled with networking gear I desperately needed for a “M”MORPG game I was building. The return label read “53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50”. In the game, players were elves scrambling to defeat a corrupted workshop. The final boss was S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ Santa himself. It was only when I was older that I appreciated that he had probably sent me thousands of dollars worth of gear (and not in 2020 dollars!) in addition to the invaluable advice he provided, sometimes (frankly, often) unsolicited but always direct and always thought provoking. While I never did become an extremely competent commercial developer, to this day I enjoy programming for programming’s own sake. Larry’s push for me to fix my own headaches, rather than simply giving me a metaphorical aspirin, resulted in my development of solutions for small hobby problems that it appeared often only myself and perhaps a few others shared. As it turns out, in spite of (or thanks to) my niche interests, my curiosity and the method of targeted problem solving Larry fostered set me on a path I remain on today. Frankly, his contributions helped mold me as a man more than those of any other mentor of mine; that is absolutely meant as a compliment to his prescient pedagogy, rather than a slight at my life’s many other wonderful influences. I’ve sold a few businesses thanks to Larry’s problem solving approach. The rest I founded are running profitably - and somehow I’ve never lost an investor money. My customers have always, above all else, been happy because they had their problems fixed. (Or, perhaps thanks to his influence, their happiness stemmed from my teams simply providing them with the tools they needed to solve their own problems!) And because I followed Larry’s personal advice, I have been able to spend every day for nearly two decades doing what he encouraged and what has consistently engaged me: finding, isolating and destroying problems. Thank you for everything.

zymhan 7y ago
Wow, that is quite the gesture.
zarmin 7y ago
Great story, thanks for sharing.

ColinWright 7y ago

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558

jakelazaroff 7y ago

Tangentially related question: is this why HN currently has a black bar above the navigation? To commemorate his death?

donarb 7y ago
Yes, people of significance in computing are honored this way.
penagwin 7y ago
Yes, HN does this when people who were impactful to the technology world have died to commemorate them.

linguae 7y ago

I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news. The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism. With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about advancing the state of research in the areas of programming languages, systems software, and human-computer interaction. There were many great people that were part of this group, including Larry Tesler and Don Norman. I completely understand why Steve Jobs shut down this group in 1997; times were rough for Apple, and the company couldn't afford to do research when its core business was in dire straits. But I wish Apple revived this group when its fortunes changed, and I also wish Apple still had the focus on usability and improving the personal computing experience that it had in the 1980s and 1990s.

mikelevins 7y ago
Larry was influential in the development and the missions of both ATG and the Human Interface Group, both of which are now gone now. He believed in conducting practical experiments with users and collecting objective measurements of how well UI worked. He wanted to find general principles that could be used to make all software better for everyone. Steve Jobs killed both ATG and HIG. I think your point about times being rough and money being tight are valid, but three years earlier Steve Jobs sat in my office at NeXT and told me that if it was up to him, Apple would kill ATG and HIG--not because they were expensive, but because, in his words, they had too much influence. Sure enough, when he took over Apple again, he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself. You're probably right that cutting those expenses was important to Apple's recovery. I think your other point is right, too, though: we'd be better off if Apple--or somebody--reconstituted something like HIG to show the industry what's possible if you take user experience and human-computer interaction seriously. Unfortunately, Larry can't help us with it this time.
- audiometry 7y ago
  "he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself." ooh ouch that's a sharp, and understated, line!

dreamcompiler 7y ago

I'm very sorry to hear this. He was the instigator of Dylan and it's not wrong to say there would be no Clozure Common Lisp (my preferred development platform) today if not for Larry Tesler.

burnJS 7y ago

Don't mode me bro.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dazrafio 7y ago

So long our dear friend Larry. You have been such an inspiration. Amongst other achievements, the Newton is still such an incredible machine (and love Dylan)

kristianp 7y ago

There's one thing on his wikipedia page which I think is probably wrong: I don't think Wirth had any involvement with Object Pascal.

jdswain 7y ago
I think he did, as a consultant. The main reference I found was an article in MacTech, written by an Apple employee: "Object Pascal is an extension to the Pascal language that was developed at Apple in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal." http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/Ob...
- haeberli 7y ago
  I was (distantly) there, and I recall Wirth being there and visiting.

mikelevins 7y ago

I met Larry in about 1992 when I went to work on the Newton project. I had seen him around Apple before, and I knew who he was and what he was known for, but I didn't actually meet him until I joined the Newton team. I found him friendly, modest, smart, shrewd, compassionate, full of interesting knowledge and ideas, and interested in other people and their ideas. I got to know him better when John Sculley ordered him to have the Newton team ditch its Lisp OS and write one in C++. Larry approached me and a couple of other Lisp hackers and asked us to make a fresh start with Lisp and see what we could do on Newton. We wrote an experimental OS that Matt Maclaurin named "bauhaus". Larry had a sabbatical coming up right about then. He took it with us. He crammed into a conference room with three or four of us and hacked Lisp code for six weeks. He was a solid Lisp hacker. He stayed up late with us and wrote AI infrastructure for the experimental OS, then handed it off to me when he had to, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on." He hung around with us brainstorming and arguing about ideas. He had us out to his house for dinner. A little later, when things were hectic and pressure was high on Newton, one of our colleagues killed himself. Larry roamed the halls stopping to talk to people about how they were doing. I was at my desk when he came by, next to another colleague that I considered a friend. Larry stopped by to check on us. My friend had also been a good friend of the fellow who had died, and he lost his composure. Larry grabbed a chair, pulled it up close and sat with him, an arm around him, patting him gently while his grief ran its course. After Newton was released, Larry moved on to other projects. I worked on the shipped product for a while, but I was pretty burned out. Steve Jobs persuaded me to go to work for NeXT for a little while. Steve is infamous for being, let's say, not as pleasant as Larry. In fact, he sat in my office once trashing Larry for about half an hour, for no good reason, as far as I can see. I politely disagreed with a number of his points. Larry made important contributions to the development of personal computing, and he didn't have to be a jerk to do it. Larry was extremely smart, but I never knew him to play I'm-smarter-than-you games. I saw him encourage other people to pursue, develop, and share their ideas. I found him eager to learn new things, and more interested in what good we could do than in who got the credit for it. We weren't close friends, except maybe when we were crammed in a conference room together for six weeks. I didn't see him much after Newton, though we exchanged the occasional friendly email over the years. I was just thinking lately that it was about time to say hello to him again. Oops. Larry Tesler was one of the best people I met in Silicon Valley. He was one of the best people I've met, period. I'll miss him.

bobbiechen 7y ago

Rest in peace. It's incredible how young computing is, many of his contributions are so fundamental. From a guest lecture Larry Tesler gave at CMU in 2014 [1]: Click to select an insertion point. Double click to select a word. Click and drag to select a passage. All of those were new. Type to replace the selection by new text [...] I think that was not unprecedented, but it wasn’t common. Cut to move the selection to a buffer, Pentti Kanurva had done it, tvedit. Paste to replace the selection by the buffer. Again, Pentti had done that [...] Control B to bold the selection, I and U and so on [...] All of these things were introduced in Gypsy, 1975. Gypsy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software) [1] https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e6adfb43-be90-46b3-9009-23cd98b7a898 https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...

bsimpson 7y ago

I've been meaning to watch one of his presentations for a while: "Origins of the Apple Human Interface" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4

mc3 7y ago

I'm bad at names, so I didn't know the name, but followed the Wikipedia link and saw he was the "modeless" advocate, and I learned about that from this awesome Bret Victor talk: https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366. Someone has commented to forward to 38 minutes to hear it. That Bret Victor talk still influences me today, so please watch it I think it'll help you if you haven't watched it already.

davidhariri 7y ago

I didn’t know of Larry Tesler, but reading the comments makes me want to lead like he did. Looking forward to learning more about his life. My condolences to his friends here.

marai2 7y ago

From his resume: 1962-1964 Stanford University Departments of Genetics and Computer Science programmer

svat 7y ago

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the old manual online at http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways: - It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for The Art of Computer Programming on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real" digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others: https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf - Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here: https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/scribe https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/... Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think) for his work on PUB: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949 (with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).

OrgNet 7y ago

https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png

yters 7y ago

Wow reading the comments sounds like actually a great human being. Help me realize being a jerk is an anti pattern, even though I am sometimes tempted to think otherwise.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

Does anyone else find it strange that there’s rarely any mention of cause of death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?

Stratoscope 7y ago
Sometimes it's mentioned, sometimes the family prefers privacy. It's not uncouth to ask, but it's good to respect that privacy if the family does not share the cause of death.
pmcjones 7y ago
Markoff's obituary [1] in the New York Times says, "The cause was not known, his wife, Colleen Barton, said, but in recent years he had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident." [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle...

justlexi93 7y ago

Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist. He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.

kianigreycliff 7y ago

rest in peace

ckaps 7y ago

What

sheri 7y ago

I was in college, and attended a career fair for Amazon back in 2002. I was not in my last year so I really went just for free food. It was quite sparse, and after a while one guy with a friendly smile just walked up to me and said "Hi, I'm Larry". We talked a little bit about my background, about Amazon and opportunities there. I felt like I was a hotshot at the time, and quite frankly didn't. Only after I went back to my dorm and looked him up did I realize who I was talking to. He was super humble, super nice. I acted like a jerk, thinking I was hot stuff and everybody was there to court me and was there just for free pizza. Despite being infinitely more accomplished than I could ever be, he was nice, engaging and never treated me in kind. Every so often I think back to that time and kick myself at the lost opportunity to have a conversation with one of the legends of Silicon Valley. Thank you Larry.

astatine 7y ago

RIP Larry Tesler. I rather feel a worm for not being aware of him till today. Nevertheless, hearing the many personal stories here on HN of his work, humility and graciousness, make me thankful for him and his tribe that have made the software profession so much more richer.

spullara 7y ago

One of the strangest moments in my career was Larry asking me for career advice when we were both at Yahoo; I think because I had been an IC for really long time and had figured out how to leverage that into strategic positions. Great man with incredible accomplishments.

alankay 7y ago

I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland. There is an excellent obit for Larry at: https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408 https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocat... ... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his -- in the NYTimes. In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much influence in too many areas for there to be any chance to characterize him technically. In short, he was a superb wide-spectrum(real) computer scientist who was also a very talented and skilled programmer. His passing was sudden and unexpected, and I may return later to this note to add more details of his rich career. For now, I remember him as great to work with in all aspects of his life. He was a great guy, and perhaps that sums him up as best as can be.

oblio 7y ago
Is anyone from Parc still involved in research these days? Or is everyone retired or just chugging along at regular corporate jobs?
- alankay 7y ago
  Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research. Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wound up doing further research. But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I and many others. It was a calling, never a job.
  - danmaz74 7y ago
    > Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Metcalfe?
    - impeachgod 7y ago
      I think Alan Kay is referring to Charles Simonyi. According to Forbes, his net worth is $4.3 billion: https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/charles-simonyi/

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daianamadalina 7y ago

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mister_hn 7y ago

Never heard about him here in EU

netuser1 7y ago

Thank you, Larry.

billman 7y ago

Wow. I didn't realize how influential the Bronx High School of Science was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_Science_alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_S...

lukaserat 7y ago

dkonofalski 7y ago

Is it possible for the HN staff to put a rollover on the black bar or link it to threads like this. I see an uptick in the "why is there a black bar?" threads every time it goes up and it would be nice to acknowledge the people that have contributed to technology and spread awareness of what they've done for people that might not know.

bandrami 7y ago

LanceKlass 7y ago

This posting and Larry's obit take me back to the math applications class we took at Bronx Science our senior year. Writing a program for the IBM 640 (yes, the 640), coding the IBN cards ourselves and then the fateful experience of loading the program cards into the reader for the 640 was a scary experience. Larry's program apparently did primes while mine did the Fibonacci series. Then the 640, the size of a modern SUV, chugged away all night and the next day it generated voluminous print-out's, lots and lots of paper. What fun! After graduation he went off to Stamford to continue math - and programming - and I went elsewhere for liberal arts. But no matter, I couldn't have done what Larry did or create what he created. I remember him as a great guy, very mellow, and if memory serves he was on the track team as well. Perfect for Stanford. Apparently he affected those he worked with the same way he affected me - an easy-going guy, friendly, positive, ready to smile. I know he'll be missed greatly.

Xavier45 7y ago

Bet

alankay 7y ago

A very nice remembrance by John Markoff in the NYTimes: https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9uOwZooDufhaU?reason=invalid_cred https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9u...

neonate 7y ago
That link doesn't work for me, but these do: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle... http://archive.md/J7bOw http://archive.md/J7bOw
- alankay 7y ago
  Thanks!

drallison 7y ago

Obits in the national press: NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesle... WAPO: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler-inventor-of-copy-and-paste-computer-functions-dies-at-74/2020/02/20/e5699f6e-541c-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler...

Tempora 7y ago

RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.