Sad news for the Apple community today. Longterm Apple employee Larry Tesler passed away on February 17, aged 74.
Larry Tesler’s 50 Years in Tech
Mr. Tesler worked at Apple between 1980 and 1997. He was born in 1945 in New York. He went on to study computer science at Stanford University. Amongst his many career highlights, he is credited with inventing the Cut, Copy, and Paste functions that we all use every day. As the Vice President of AppleNet and Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, he worked on projects like Lisa and the Newton MessagePad. It wasn’t just at Apple where Mr. Tesler left his mark though. He had a range of experience in the technology industry over a 50-year period. During his illustrious career, he worked for the likes of Amazon, Yahoo, 23andMe, and MINE. He also co-founded ARM, negotiating the deal that saw it spun-off from Apple and helped recruit its first CEO. Mr. Tesler ended his career as a consultant.
There is a full obituary over on Cult of Mac which is very much worth reading. Its author, Luke Dromhel, spoke to Mr. Tesler for his book The Apple Revolution.
Before Apple became a wanna be Sony – there was a Computing Company that made really cool computers with WYSIWYG screens and a mouse and easy peasy “macro” key combos way before the evil empire did…. and Mr Tesler’s name was ALL over it. C & P might as well be inventing the Hammer. It’s a universal bikkty-bam (along with drag-n-drop) I use every day in ALL apps – not just word processing. I’m cutting and pasting movie clips; “regions” and the automated effects in the regions in any DAW from Avid to Apple; objects and layers in Adobe Suite stuff… pretty much anything you can ‘select’ of any format from data to images can be CnP’d. The Dogcow is Booing tonight. Thank you Larry, cool guy from the Cool Era of Apple Computer, Inc. 💾