Larry Tesler, an American computer scientist and mathematician, died on February 17 at the age of 74. If you can copy and paste the sentences of this article it is thanks to him: together with his colleague Timothy Mott, in 1973 he devised the copy-paste system to transfer parts of text into computer programs, eliminating the need to rewrite them every time. Although little known to the general public, Tesler can be considered among the pioneers of modern computer science: he participated in the design of one of the first programs with a graphical interface to write texts, he was the first to use a laptop on an airplane and to demonstrate to Steve Jobs a graphic system of symbols and icons that would change IT forever.
Tesler was born on April 24, 1945 in New York and then attended Stanford University, becoming interested in computer science, at a time when computers were still bulky and heavy machines. After graduation, he didn't struggle to find more than a consultant job: in the area of Palo Alto (California) where he lived he was among the few to have marked himself as a “computer programmer” in telephone directories.
Xerox PARC
In the early 1970s, Tesler left the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with which he had started a collaboration a few years earlier, moving to Oregon with the daughter (she had recently divorced). After struggling to find a new job, Tesler first came into contact with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a research center that would become legendary in the history of computing. Founded by Xerox, a photocopier company, the research center was conceived as a space in which to develop new and futuristic ideas to exploit the opportunities offered by information technology.
In 1973, PARC was well underway with the development of the Xerox Alto, a single-user computer (“workstation”) that the company believed should have served as a prototype for the computers of the future. The project was not the only one of this type in the panorama of IT companies, but it was certainly the one with the greatest potential, linked above all to the development of innovative software solutions, designed to make the use of programs more practical and simple.
Copy and paste
Together with Mott, in 1975 Tesler designed and developed Gypsy, the first word processor based on the use of a pointer moved by a mouse, to select options and settings from a graphical interface. It had been created with the intention of improving and enriching Bravo, another word processing software created the year before by some Tesler colleagues at PARC.
Tesler and Mott followed a very creative approach, spending hours imagining what the plans of the future would be like, thinking about what measures could be taken to improve the user experience. Today it seems obvious that on the screen of a computer, or our smartphones, there are images and icons, and that by clicking on them with the mouse or touching them with a finger, something happens. About fifty years ago a computer displayed a black and white (or green and black) screen and needed text commands to perform its rather rudimentary tasks.
It was with the complication of having to rewrite commands each time, or having to use complicated combinations to recall them, that Tesler invented an easier way to copy portions of text. It was he who proposed that the words “copy” and “cut” be used to copy a text (or copy it by removing it) and “paste” for the next step, in which the text is reproduced elsewhere. The new function was introduced in word processing systems developed at PARC starting from 1974, without their creators having a clear idea of the scope of the invention.
WYSIWYG
Tesler over the years has shown to have a great deal of attention for the development of interfaces, i.e. systems between software and users, which allow the latter to use the programs, ideally in the most accessible way possible. Throughout his life he would conduct a kind of personal crusade against modal systems, such as windows that open while using a program and that necessarily require action before being able to return to the previous window where you were working.
In some cases modal windows are useful, for example to allow the program to ask if you really want to close a file without saving it, but in other circumstances they interrupt the workflow by confusing users too much, and leading them to make mistakes. Tesler was so obsessed with “modeless” that he had his car's personalized license plate saying “NO MODES”. (His website is also called nomodes.com as is his Twitter account.)
Working at PARC, Tesler tried to promote as much as possible the concept of user-friendly interfaces, arguing that this feature should always be present in the evaluation of the usability of a computer system. He was among the first to use the expression “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG, “what you see is what it is”), to indicate the fact that a text on the screen must have the same layout characteristics once which is printed. Later the meaning would have been extended to other areas, for example to that of the creation of web pages.
A weighty laptop
If Tesler's history is intertwined with many of the evolutions in computer science, which would have led computers to become personal computers, it is of its collaboration with PARC. Also in the 1970s, he participated in the creation of the Xerox NoteTaker, one of the first portable computers. At the time the idea of being able to walk around with a computer seemed a bit crazy, and perhaps for this reason Tesler and colleagues tried to pursue it with a certain obstinacy.
An early NoteTaker prototype weighed 16 kilograms, about 10 times the weight of a laptop today. Together with colleague Douglas Fairbairn, Tesler took a tour of Xerox locations in the United States for demonstrations of the new laptop. One day, while they were traveling, they tested some features at the airport and later during a flight. It was probably the first time anyone had taken a computer on a plane and used it, Tesler would later recall. Despite the potential, the NoteTaker did not get much interest and Xerox decided it was wiser to continue with the development of the Xerox Alto, shelving the other project.
Great artists steal
In 1979 Steve Jobs, who three years earlier had founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, made a couple of visits to PARC, considered at the time one of the benchmarks for computer science in Palo Alto. During his first visit, it was Tesler who conducted a demonstration of the Xerox Alto and its graphical interface, surprising Jobs with the innovative way of managing the interaction between the machine and the user. As Tesler would later say, Jobs was thrilled: “You're sitting on a gold mine! I can't believe Xerox didn't take advantage of it. “
Jobs's two visits – during which he was also shown one of the first computer mice – would have been called by some “the greatest heist in the history of computing.” Apple took up much of the ideas seen at PARC to design its first computers, making graphical interfaces and the mouse a commercial success. In the following years Jobs would have admitted several times, jokingly or more seriously, that he had drawn great inspiration from the work of Tesler and his colleagues: “Picasso repeated that: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal' and we are never ashamed to steal great ideas “. (Jobs's visits were, however, also agreed following an investment by Xerox in Apple.)
It is good to remember that in the early years of the transition of information technology to a personal dimension there was a great ferment in California: small and large companies experimented with hardware and software, with enthusiasts and impaled ones doing the same in a smaller dimension, in their garages. home. Jobs certainly copied some ideas born at PARC, but he had the right insights to improve them and make them a commercial success.
Once, recalling the surprise with which he discovered the progress made at PARC, Jobs commented by recalling that the Xerox executives: “They were obsessed with copiers and had no idea what a computer could do. They remedied a defeat from the biggest victory achieved by the computer industry. Xerox could have had the entire computer industry “.
With Apple
Tesler realized that Jobs was right, with Xerox that he was not exploiting his ideas and did not know what to do with them: he decided to leave the company and to go to work for Apple in 1980, along with some of his other colleagues. He collaborated in the development of Lisa, one of Apple's first computers and largely based on the innovations designed for the Xerox Alto.
In the 1990s, Tesler was one of the central figures in the development of Newton, a kind of handheld device considered the ancestor of the tablets we use today. Various innovations were conceived for the new product, some of which were too advanced and ambitious to be easily realized with the components available at the time. Newton was not particularly successful and, by Tesler's own admission, ended up stealing important resources from Apple, which was starting to have serious problems sustaining itself economically.
In 1997, Tesler left Apple and founded a small software company specializing in developing systems for popularizing programming languages in schools. The company lasted a little less than ten years, but in the meantime Tesler had signed a contract with Amazon, making an important contribution in improving the site's interface for shopping online. After leaving Amazon in 2005, he would briefly work at other Silicon Valley companies, such as the search engine Yahoo !. Rather shy and focused on his projects, in the last decade Tesler worked as an external consultant for several companies.
Reflecting on the idea of making computers easier to use at a time when you didn't even know what to do with a PC, Tesler once said: “I was born for that and it was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. “.
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“I was born for that and it was lucky to be in the right place at the right time”.
