Man behind cut, copy, paste, passes away at 74

ONE OF the most used features of text formatting even until now are cut, copy, paste and find and replace commands. Lawrence “Larry” Tesler the man behind these conveniences has died on Monday, February 17. He was 74.

It was on Thursday, February 20 when Xerox tweeted about the sad news, saying, “The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler.”

However, instead of mourning, Xerox invited its followers to “celebrate” Tesler.

“Your workday is thanks to his revolutionary ideas. Larry passed away Monday, so please join us in celebrating him,” it added.

Tesler was a computer scientist who was born in New York and graduated from Stanford University in the 1960s with a degree of Bachelor of Science in Mathematics.

After graduation and prior to working at Xero, he worked at

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Tesler also worked for technology brand giant Apple in the 1970s for almost two decades. Aside from these known companies, Tesler also spent some years in Amazon and Yahoo!.

In the 2005 article “Of Modes and Men” in the magazine IEEE Spectrum, writer Tekla S. Perry attributed the word “browser” to be coined by Tesler.

The article says that after some of his co-workers complain that it was hard to browse on a computer, Tesler was “so sick of hearing that” that he was going to implement a browser – which was the first time the term was used before being adapted to how it is known today. ■