Larry Tesler, inventor of copy and paste, died at the age of 74

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If you can easily copy and paste the link for this article, it’s thanks to the invention of Larry Tesler.

Larry Tesler may not be as well known as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but without his invention, the use of computers would be very complicated today.

Indeed, it is to him that we attribute the invention of copy and paste. His death at the age of 74 was announced by Xerox on Twitter. “The inventor of cut / copy and paste, find and replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler. Your working day is easier thanks to its revolutionary ideas. Larry died on Monday […] ”, the publication reads.

As the BBC tells in an article published this week, Larry Tesler was born in 1945 in the Bronx, in New York, United States. He started working in Silicon Valley in the 1960s. And as you can imagine, at the time, handling computers was not as easy as it is today.

It was during his years at Xerox that Tesler had the idea of facilitating the use of computers with copy and paste, but also with the cut, find (or search) and replace functions, which are also great. useful when writing code.

His invention helped make computers easier for ordinary people to use

But Larry Tesler also worked at Apple, where he was able to become chief scientist. In his CV, Tesler wrote: “I was mistakenly identified as” the father of the graphical user interface for Macintosh. ” I wasn’t. However, a paternity test could expose me as one of his many grandparents. “

On the other hand, he identified himself well as “the main inventor of the edition without modes and to cut, copy, paste. “

On a graphical interface, a mode is, as Wikipedia explains, “a separate parameter in a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived results different from what it would produce in other parameters ”. The most commonly cited example is the “caps lock” key. The inventor of copy and paste didn’t like modes and was for simpler interfaces to use. His personal website was nomodes.com while his Twitter account was @nomodes.