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Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)
- colesantiago 2y ago(2020)
- moffkalast 2y agoCopy and pasting the old news story has to be some ironically fitting way to honor the man.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoLarry Tesler was a great figure in computing history, but why is this being reposted now? "Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe his accomplishments.
- Moomoomoo309 2y agoI think it's a fantastic way to describe his accomplishments, it gives context to how early and groundbreaking his work was in a way that even the least tech-savvy can understand. Everyone knows what cut and paste are, no one thinks about the fact that someone had to come up with it.
- nusl 2y agoThe article does mention other things, though it makes sense that they would highlight what he's most-famous for.
- amszmidt 2y agoLimited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those. They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing strings, etc.
- ralferoo 2y agoAlso, I don't think it particularly counts as an invention as it was heavily used in publishing well before the computer era, and was just shifting to a computing context and re-using the same metaphor. For a long time, text was printed in sections, physically cut up and pasted to a board, and when the entire page was assembled it was photographed to create a negative that was used to print the newspaper. Just to be clear that I'm not intending to disrespect his work, just arguing the semantic meaning of "invention" with respect to this. His obsession with mode-less user interfaces and user-facing simplicity is far more significant a contribution to society in general (and ironically, cut-and-paste is almost the antithesis of his main philosophy as the once-cut data becomes hidden state - it'd be a better metaphor to highlight the data and physically move it around the document).
- kalleboo 2y ago> the once-cut data becomes hidden state It's not completely hidden - you can view it using "Show Clipboard"
- II2II 2y agoThe wording of the article suggests that he came up with the term "cut and paste", rather than the concept: > In 1969 Tesler volunteered to help create a catalog for the Bay Area’s Mid-Peninsula Free University. He and Jim Warren, founder of the West Coast Computer Faire, did the paste-up for that catalog. Around the same time, Tesler saw a demo of a computer command that allowed you to bring back something that you had deleted. The command was called “Escape P Semicolon” (or something similarly arcane). Several years later, when Tesler was at Xerox PARC writing a white paper about the future of computing, he drew on the memory of those two experiences to predict that you would be able to “cut and paste” within computer documents.
- chucksmash 2y agoDiscussed at the time: Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com) 1346 points on Feb 19, 2020 | 155 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 Edit: Original URL updated from BBC obit to IEEE post so this is a bit of a non sequitur now.
- mark-r 2y agoIt amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.
- johannes1234321 2y agoIt's a good reminder, that everything had to be invented at some point in time. Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...
- account42 2y agoI'm not sure if invented is the right term in all cases. Discovered may be more appropriate in some.
- otras 2y agoI’m loosely reminded of that Roger Sterling quote from Mad Men: ”I'll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: 99 cents. Somebody thought of that."
- airstrike 2y agoIndeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial little things I had to write that everyone including me would take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a translucent version of the shape when it's being moved/resized, changing the position of the shape when it is resized from _some_ of the handles but not all (top left vs. bottom right)...
- escapecharacter 2y agojust wait until you get to the undo/redo stack! That's one of my favourite parts of a UI to program.
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- mococa 2y agoLarry Tesler: Computer scientist behind cut, copy and paste dies aged 74
- milkshakes 2y agoBret Victor - Larry's Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU (~38:08)
- seltzered_ 2y ago'No modes' ...this was a super influential talk for many of us a decade ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196513
- aaron695 2y ago(2020) and a shit article. Better - https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the 70's. BBC wrongly somewhat implies Cut/Paste was 80s, in the post computing invention era.
- dang 2y agoOk, we changed to that article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695. Thanks!
- deforestgump 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- globalise83 2y agoCtrl C, Ctrl V 1946. Ctrl X 2020.
- PorschtU 2y agoRIP to a legend!
- jrh3 2y agoNice features but I still prefer yank and put.
- Cerium 2y ago(cough) kill and yank.
- zuckerma 2y agoWhat a sad story.
- _aaed 2y agoHow so?
- bluGill 2y agoOne button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile and someone young and fast with the same timeouts - this is often impossible)
- kps 2y agoDouble-clicking is also undiscoverable. People had to be taught about it. Nothing natural or previously familiar works that way.
- layer8 2y agoTo be fair, people also had to be taught how to point with a mouse. The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide: 8<–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Shortcuts The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents. Because you use these commands so frequently, the Office System includes a simple shortcut for performing these tasks: clicking the mouse button twice. To tear off a sheet of stationery, click twice rapidly on the stationery pad icon. To open an icon into a window, click twice rapidly on the icon. To close an open window, click twice rapidly on the window's title bar icon. Clicking twice to close a window can either set aside the object or save and put away the object, depending on where the object's shadows are. If there is a shadow on the desktop, clicking twice causes the object to be set aside. If the only shadow is in a folder or on a disk, clicking twice summons a dialog box, which asks you whether you want the object set aside or put away. 8<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
- bluGill 2y agoPointing with the mouse is discoverable though. If you start moving it - which odds are you will do sometime (even by accident) you will see the pointer moving and eventually figure it out. You are very unlikely to discover the double click by accident.
- PopAlongKid 2y agoJust as others have pointed out that cut-and-paste was a term around a long time before this reference, so too was WYSIWYG. The Dramatics had a top popular song in 1971[0] using the same phrase as its title (albeit spelled slightly differently). I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented" the term "desktop", or "folder". [0]https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-Whatcha-See-Is-Whatcha-Get https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-Whatcha-...
- layer8 2y ago"Cut and paste" was of course a term used with paper before computers, but arguably the computer version of it is not quite the same, because you have that hidden buffer ("clipboard") and can usually paste the same cut item multiple times. Adapting the physical-world cut-and-paste process to the computer realm can count as an invention.
- qup 2y agoWhat you see is what I get
- fsckboy 2y agoWhat they said is what I don't get
- themacguffinman 2y agoHis Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably: > Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not. The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company. [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
- hulitu 2y ago> surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company. surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.
- dmoy 2y agoKeep in mind that was written like 12 years ago, when things looked differently than they do now. (Notably that's pre material design and pre kennedy (the precursor to material))
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agoarticle is from Aug 2005, so more like 19 years... I became suspicious when I was told the hero of the story left Amazon to join Yahoo!, which, y'know, was what people were wont to do back in the day, not so much anymore I'd guess
- 2y ago
- shortformblog 2y agoI wrote a remembrance when he died a few years back. The timing of this story (2005) is a little unfortunate, because the genius of the Newton investment only showed itself later, even with its failure: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-inventor-of-copy-paste-was-more-influential-than-you-realize/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-inve... See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave Apple an inside line/competitive advantage with ARM that we’re still seeing today, it also meant that Apple owned ARM stock—and could sell it. When the company was near its nadir in the late 1990s, it nursed itself back to health by selling shares of ARM. So even Tesler’s biggest failure was a stroke of genius.
- sleepybrett 2y agoI have an old messagepad (110) and ran across it a few months back when I was going through some of my storage boxes. Plopped some AA batteries in it and it booted right up. Still a great user interface and the handwriting recognition still works great (though it is a little slow). Very much ahead of it's time, the early palm era was such a massive backslide (aside from size and price).
- bee_rider 2y agoI wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article. Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor. Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font. Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.
- zzo38computer 2y agoI agree, WYSIWYG is not a good idea, and a one button mouse is not a good idea. You can have print preview if you want to preview the page layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing the text as it is being typed, anyways. (I don't know why the spelling is different)
- ilaksh 2y agoFascinating.. you are aware of the context of how WYSIWYG came about? So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer? Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm is?
- zzo38computer 2y ago> where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer? That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible with most modern computers; this can be done independently of WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to display it on the computer before you print it on paper. Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview; if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold, italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.
- fsckboy 2y agoDifferent people's brains work differently, essentially innately. And skilled trained brains work differently than the same brain did green. It doesn't seem that Tesler's work ever reflected these important details about the world. I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough of his!)
- creeble 2y agoMy favorite Larry Tesler contribution is Tesler’s Law or the Law of Conservation of Complexity[1]. It answers the question “why does this have to be so complicated?”, which I have found to be useful in countless numbers of UI discussions. “We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an uncomplicated way.” Well, it can’t be less complicated than any one of those things then. https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable-complexity-43e07d457f65 https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable...
- dredmorbius 2y agoWhat's the relationship with Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_requisite_variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_r...> There's also Larry Wall's "Waterbed Theory", effectively that complexity cannot be squashed down: it will out. Though I suspect this post-dates Tesler. <https://nick.groenen.me/people/larry-wall/ https://nick.groenen.me/people/larry-wall/>
- FjordWarden 2y agoI've always missed is this X.org behaviour on OSX where you copy just by selecting text and past text by pressing the middle mouse button.
- chuckadams 2y agoWhich makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting. Also, except for terminals, it typically pastes at the pointer location, so you need precise aim (emacs thankfully lets you customize this, but UI toolkit widgets usually don’t)
- ropejumper 2y ago> Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting. In principle this is false with a Plan9-like model of mouse chording. Holding left click over a selection and tapping middle click is a reasonable solution.
- FjordWarden 2y agoBut for those cases you just use cmd+v or whatever
- morsch 2y agoYeah, and I keep pasting the wrong thing because the terminal emulator tries to simulate the X behavior (which is very useful) but doesn't maintain a separate buffer like X does.
- hinkley 2y ago> Tesler registered a strange combination of sensitivity to people and fascination with math. The best career choice the counselor could suggest was working as an architect or maybe becoming a certified public accountant. A CPA?? Im glad to see that counselors have always been terrible?
- outlore 2y ago“no modes”, i’ve always considered that to be a bit of a mantra worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on). yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!
- ilaksh 2y agoI also use vim (or neovim). But that doesn't mean that I believe in modes or that neovim/vim is a good editor. I think there is some kind of psychological thing driving this. Like subconsciously, I came to the conclusion many years ago that "real programmers" use vim or Emacs, and then consciously decided that the default keybindings for Emacs were slightly worse. So for decades I have been trying to learn just enough vim to get by. But practically every day I miss my PC keys for things like selecting text. At least three times I have got my keybindings the way I wanted and then after a new install or something just decided to deal with the outdated way that vim does it. You have to realize the context that vim was invented. There was no WYSIWYG. People were used to things like 'ed' where everything was a command. Just being able to stay in a mode and move around freely on the screen was a big deal. The terminal hardware didn't even have a way to hold a key combination.
- norir 2y agoVim modes allow you to keep your hands on the home row most of the time and make a mouse unnecessary for editing. That keeps my hands, wrists and forearms healthy and for that I am grateful. Of course a great programmer is not defined by their tools. What matters is what you create, not how you create it.
- norir 2y agoThe nice thing about a mantra like no modes is that you're right 9/10 times. But I won't go back to non-modal text editing.
- dang 2y agoRelated - with a top comment by alankay: Larry Tesler Has Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 - Feb 2020 (149 comments)
- klelatti 2y ago> He even convinced Apple to invest in a newly created company, Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., also in Cambridge, that would produce them. And that stake was quite possibly crucial in helping Apple survive. > Plus it's on record that Apple made a total of $1.1 billion out of selling those shares, which represented a profit of 366 times its original investment. That money helped Apple survive, and Jobs decision to cut the Newton — with its ARM processor — was also part of the surgery needed to keep Apple alive.[1] [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-been-crucial-to-each-others-survival-for-three-decades https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...
- AlbertCory 2y ago> So why haven’t you heard of him? Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published). > “And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’” Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did. > As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ]. The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M. (he IS a little stiff in this) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- Animats 2y agoThe Mac effectively had a multi-button mouse. It's just that the mode shift buttons were on the keyboard.
- jecel 2y agoThe comments show a lot of confusion about what Tesler invented. Other industries did indeed use cut/copy/paste and older editors had ways to do these functions. But the cursor in these editors normally indicated a character. Larry figured out that if instead the cursor indicated the space between characters and he sometimes had a second such cursor to indicate all characters between them then he could do what previous editors needed various commands with a single operation: replace the selection with what has just been typed and move the cursor to right after that. "paste" would the just the equivalent of retyping a previous selection that had been either "cut" or "copied". If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then inserting anything more you type. And so on. Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.
- riquisimo 2y agoWYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get" that refers to software which allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation. ... For anyone else who didn't want to look it up.
- slackfan 2y agoRIP. The one button mouse was significantly underrated. Using the keyboard keys as modifier keys to the mouse was ergonomically great, and anybody who complains about the mouse seems to never really understand how that system worked.