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Larry Tesler: Man behind cut, copy and paste command dies at 74

Xerox paid tribute to him saying, “The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more, was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler

Larry Tesler: Man behind cut, copy and paste command dies at 74

Lawrence Gordon Tesler popularly known as Larry Tesler died on Monday. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Icon of early computing, who invented the concept of cut, copy and paste command, has died at the age of 74.

Lawrence Gordon Tesler popularly known as Larry Tesler died on Monday.

Tesler was born in 1945 in New York and studied computer science at Stanford. He started working at the silicon valley at a time when computers were inaccessible to a vast majority of people.

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He joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973, where he developed the cut, copy, and paste command that made computers even more easy for a layman.

Xerox paid tribute to him saying, “The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more, was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler,” the company tweeted. “Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas.”

The concepts would later become instrumental user interface building blocks for both text editors and entire computer operating systems (OS).

In 1979, Tesler was assigned to show Apple co-founder Steve Jobs around Xerox PARC, including the tour in which Jobs and a few other Apple employees got to see Xerox’s Alto computer in action.

The computer featured icons, windows, folders, a mouse, pop-up menus, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor, Ethernet-based local networking and network-based printing and games, Gizmodo reported.

(With input from agencies)

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