Remembering Larry Tesler, a computer pioneer

On Feb 16, 2020 Larry Tesler died at the age of 74. He was a true pioneer in software and hardware technology. Born in New York in 1945, Larry spent most of his professional years in the bay area, starting with his days at Stanford University and later at the Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (known as Xerox PARC) and Apple Computers.

During his high school years in the 1960s in NY, he taught himself the Fortran language and found the syntax too clumsy. So his focus from the early days was how to simplify the use of computers. As a teenager he devised a way to generate prime numbers. A math teacher told him he has created an algorithm, something that could be programmed into a computer. That revelation sent him scurrying to find a computer which he did at Columbia University. Those were the 1960s.

He predicted early that someday, everyone will have a computer of their own. During those years in the 1970s, computer designers tended to focus on making the machines more powerful rather than on turning them into tools for the masses. Larry wanted computers to be simple to operate for people with no computer experience. He helped create the famous cut-and-paste functions, championed a mouse with one button instead of four at Xerox PARC. He campaigned successfully against the use of "modes" in software. In early word processing apps, people had to use one mode for typing text and another mode for inserting material. Switching from one mode to the another was confusing. Larry's car license plates had the words "NO MODES".

Larry was assigned to give a tutorial to Steve Jobs in 1979 on the user interface using the mouse at Xerox PARC. As narrated in the 2011 biography by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs was hopping with excitement to discover that such a thing was even possible. This paved the way for Apple's entry into personal computers. Subsequently Jobs hired Larry Tesler at Apple in 1980. He worked on the Lisa and Newton projects. For a while he served as Apple's chief scientist.After Apple, Larry went to Amazon to work on refining user experience. Then he worked for Yahoo. His pioneering work on cut-and-paste and other functions became standards in text and message processing.

Larry Tesler was a true pioneer in computer technology and today's young generation must recognize such early pioneers who paved the way for many ideas we have taken for granted.

R.I.P. Lawrence Gordon Tessler.