A leading US computer scientist who invited the widely used “cut, copy and paste” command died at age 74.
The demise Lawrence “Larry” Tesler was announced on Twitter on Wednesday by Xerox, where he spent part of his career.
“The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler,” the company added in a statement.
“Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him.”
Tesler, who was a graduate of Stanford University specialised in human-computer interaction, employing his potential skills at Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
For the unversed, the cut and paste command was reportedly inspired by old-fashioned editing that involved actually cutting portions of printed text and affixing them elsewhere with adhesive.
“Tesler created the idea of ‘cut, copy, & paste’ and combined computer science training with a counterculture vision that computers should be for everyone,” the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley tweeted on Wednesday.
It should be noted that the command was made much more famous by Apple after being incorporated in software on the Lisa computer in the year 1983 and the original Macintosh that debuted the following year.
Tesler had worked for Apple in the year 1980 after being appointed from Xerox by late co-founder Steve Jobs.
It is worth mentioning here that Tesler had spent almost two decades years at Apple, rising to chief scientist position. He also went on to establish an education startup and did some improvements in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.