Larry Tesler, an icon of early computing, died at the age of 74 on February 16. Thanks to his innovations, including “cut” and “copy and paste” commands, personal computers became simple to learn and use.
He wasn’t as well known as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but Larry Tesler played a central early role in making computers accessible to everyone. Today, we cannot live, especially at work, without these commands as they have turned out to be key to exponentially increasing productivity in the contemporary world.
The “copy and paste” and “cut and paste” functions, created by Larry Tesler, are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom. In that sense, we tell you a little about the history of the most used keyboard commands.
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history of commands
Yes, “copy and paste” and “cut and paste” saves us time and helps a lot when working with PCs and mobile devices, but there was a time when computer users did not have this option, and they had to rewrite over and over again on their machines. Luckily, Larry Tesler arrived.
Lawrence Gordon Tesler studied computer engineering at Stanford University in the 1960s. In the following decade, Tesler began teaching human-computer interaction classes and simultaneously worked at the Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto research center.
Between 1973 and 1976, while working on the development of the first document editing system that relied on a combination of keyboard and mouse (Gypsy) with Tim Mott, he came up with three new functions that would allow recurring text to be moved to a space. of the internal memory of the computer, the so-called ‘buffer’. So I created the options “Insert”, “Copy” and “Replace”, which today we know as “Cut + Copy + Paste”.
However, it would not become popular until the early 1980s, when Apple Inc. implemented these mechanisms in its operating systems and applications, through the Lisa and Macintosh computers.
Already at that time, these actions were associated with the corresponding letters for his quick keyboard shortcuts that Microsoft would later also adopt in Windows.
Ctrl+X: to cut (due to the scissor shape of the letter)
Ctrl+C: to copy (because it is the initial of copy or copy in English)
Ctrl+V: to paste (by keyboard proximity to the other two)
This association has remained unchanged until today, becoming popular in editorial jargon as “control x”, “control c” or “control v” as a reference to the actions they produce.
First it was called “Insert”, “Copy” and “Replace”. Today we know as “Cut + Copy + Paste” (Photo: Freepik)
First it was called “Insert”, “Copy” and “Replace”. Today we know as “Cut + Copy + Paste” (Photo: Freepik)
As was the case with so many other successes of Apple at that time, Microsoft quickly applied “copy and paste” and incorporated it into the design of its first versions of Windows.
Later, Windows added that once the text was selected we could click on it with the right mouse button and choose between the copy and cut options, and then repeat the action and paste the content in a new place.
Although you cannot attribute Tesler’s professional success to “copy and paste”, it is true that this creation managed to reach the vice presidency of two giants in the sector such as Amazon (in 2004, as responsible for Shopping Experience) and Yahoo (in 2005 , as head of the Design and User Experience Group).