The man behind the "copy-paste" died at age 74

Computer scientist Larry Tesler began working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to most of the public. His inventions helped make the PC a convenient tool to use

The man behind the "copy-paste" died at age 74

Larry Tesler, one of the great icons of computer science, died at the age of 74. Tesler began working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time when computers were inaccessible to most of the public. His inventions, which included the "Cut", "Copy" and "Paste" commands, helped make the PC a convenient tool to use.

Xerox, the company he worked for when he invented the commands, tweeted in his memory: "The inventor of cut / copy and paste, find and replace, was Larry Tesler. Your work day is simply thanks to his revolutionary ideas."

Tesler was born in New York in 1945 and studied at Stanford University in California. After graduating, he specialized in designing the UI, ie, making computers more user-friendly.

Tessler worked in a huge number of companies during his long career. He started at Xerox Research Center in Palo Alto, until Steve Jobs took him to Apple, where Tesler worked for 17 years. After leaving Apple, he set up an educational startup and worked for short periods at Amazon and Yahoo.

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In a 2012 BBC interview, Tesler said of Silicon Valley: "It's like a rite of passage - after you've earned some money, you're not retiring, you're investing your time in funding other companies. There's a strong element of excitement, of being able to share what You've learned with the next generation. "

Tesler's most popular invention, copying and pasting, was based on an old method of editing where people cut physical text and pasted it elsewhere. The command was embedded into Apple's software on the Lissa and Macs that came out in the early 1980s, making it popular among the general public.

The director of the Museum of Computer History said that Tesler "mixed knowledge in computer science with a vision of counterculture, who believed that computers should be accessible to everyone."