Tech pioneer made it simpler to interact with computers
Lawrence Tesler, a pioneering computer scientist who in his work at Xerox and with Steve Jobs at Apple devoted himself to making it easier for users to interact with computers, died Feb. 16 at his home in Portola Valley, California. He was 74.
His wife, Colleen Barton, said that there was no known cause of death, but that in recent years Tesler had suffered the effects of an earlier bicycle accident.
During his career Tesler worked at a number of Silicon Valley’s most important companies. But it was as a young researcher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that he did his most significant work, helping to develop today’s style of computer interaction based on a graphical desktop metaphor and a mouse.
Early in his Xerox career (he began there in 1973), working with another researcher, Tim Mott, Tesler developed a program known as Gypsy, which did away with the restrictive modes that had made text editing complicated. For example, until Gypsy, most text-editing software had one mode for entering text and another for editing it.
Tesler was passionate about simplifying interaction with computers. At Apple he was responsible for the idea that a computer mouse should have only one button. For many years the license plate on his car read, “NO MODES.”
At Xerox PARC, his first breakthrough came when he took a newly hired secretary, sat her in front of a blank computer monitor and took notes while she described how she would prefer to compose documents with a computer. She proceeded to describe a very simple system,
Computer scientist Tesler innovated the ability to “cut and paste” text on a screen. which Tesler then implemented with Mott.
The Gypsy program contained such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” or WYSIWYG printing, a phrase Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output.
And it implemented the idea of opening a computer file by simply clicking on a screen icon while pointing at it with the mouse cursor. Before that, files had to be opened by typing the file name into a command line.
“At Xerox he pushed a lot for things to be simpler in ways that would broaden the base of users,” said David Liddle, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist who worked with Tesler at Xerox PARC. “He was always quite focused on users who weren’t also Ph.D.s in computer science.”
He continued to advocate for less costly computers. In 1978, with Adele Goldberg and Douglas Fairbairn,
he designed a portable machine called NoteTaker, a forerunner of luggable computers like the Osborne, Kaypro and Compaq machines of the early 1980s. But Xerox declined to commercialize the NoteTaker; only a few prototypes were made.
It was Tesler who gave Steve Jobs the celebrated demonstration of the Xerox Alto computer and the Smalltalk software system that would come to influence the design of first Apple’s Lisa personal computer and then its Macintosh.
Tesler left Xerox to work for Jobs at Apple in 1980.
Tesler left Apple in 1997 for a startup and later went on to work for both Amazon and Yahoo. He left Yahoo in 2008 and spent a year as a product fellow at 23andMe, the genetics information company. He was most recently an independent consultant.
Lawrence Gordon Tesler was born in the Bronx on April 24, 1945, to Isidore and Muriel (Krechman) Tesler. His father was an anesthesiologist.
At Stanford, where Tesler studied mathematics, he was involved in a number of early projects that prefigured personal computing. He had early access to a computer known as a LINC when he worked as a student programmer for the Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg. The LINC, designed by the MIT physicist Wesley A. Clark, is believed by many computer historians to have been the first true personal computer.
Tesler’s first startup venture was a programming consulting company located in a mall adjacent to the Stanford campus.
In addition to Barton, a geophysicist, and his daughter, Lisa Tesler, he is survived by two brothers, Charles and Alan.