[HN Gopher] Larry Tesler Has Died
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Larry Tesler Has Died
Larry Tesler has died. Larry was in the middle of many of the most
influential of Silicon Valley projects and an insightful
contributor. See his Wikipedia biography for a snapshot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler
Author : drallison
Score : 397 points
Date : 2020-02-18 22:53 UTC (1 days ago)
| [deleted]
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one
| of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History
| Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the
| discussion both productive and quite civil!
|
| I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in
| Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some
| suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thought
| he was one of her co-workers because the discussion was very peer
| to peer as opposed to top down. She corrected me to point out he
| was one of the movers and shakers at PARC. That left a very
| positive impression on me.
|
| He was also "the other Larry" at Xerox. Larry Garlick, who was
| also "Larry" to most people, was also at XBS (as was Eric
| Schmidt) and later followed Eric over to Sun.
| mrandolph wrote:
| Which side of the debate was he on personally?
| ilaksh wrote:
| I'm not sure that debate was really important since it's
| clear that his real answer was 'none of the above'.
| troymc wrote:
| I'm guessing Emacs, because vi has modes and he was not a fan
| of modes.
| [deleted]
| suyash wrote:
| RIP Larry Tesler, I ran into him a few times at meetup events in
| Bay Area, few people knew who he was as he kept a very low
| profile.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I met him at a meetup I went to out in SF while traveling for
| work. I didn't know anyone there, just going to kill time. I
| had no idea who he was just someone willing to chat with me for
| an hour or so. I started asking him what he did, and it was
| clear he wasn't there to talk about himself. Just struck me as
| a really cool, really humble, really approachable guy. With a
| lot of good ideas, and a passion for spreading curiosity. World
| needs more people like this, not less.
| alariccole wrote:
| This breaks my heart. I used to work next to Larry--literally sat
| next to him--on Yahoo's central design team. We were in frequent
| meetings together, but didn't talk one-on-one often. One evening
| commuting from work, during one of many Caltrain failures, he
| noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride
| home. I remember sitting nervously in the car, a bit awestruck,
| and I finally got up the courage to ask him "Did you really
| invent copy and paste?!"
|
| "Yes."
|
| From then on the ice was broken and we chatted more freely: fun
| discussions about the (then) up-and-coming voice recognition UIs
| (I compared them to CLIs which he liked), wearables, design, and
| cycling.
|
| I consider him a friend. Didn't expect us to lose him so soon.
| alariccole wrote:
| To clarify, as the dialogue could be construed otherwise, Larry
| was actually very humble. While he was not as famous as he
| should have been, he had so much influence on the industry, it
| could easily go to your head. He was very approachable and
| helpful, and overall a generous and kind person. Will be sorely
| missed.
| [deleted]
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Tangentially related question: is this why HN currently has a
| black bar above the navigation? To commemorate his death?
| donarb wrote:
| Yes, people of significance in computing are honored this way.
| penagwin wrote:
| Yes, HN does this when people who were impactful to the
| technology world have died to commemorate them.
| aresant wrote:
| A career in full from his own CV:
|
| "Board director for a FTSE 250 company, vp in three Fortune 500
| corporations, president of two small software firms. 32 years
| building and managing teams of software and hardware engineers,
| designers, researchers, scientists, product managers and
| marketers to deliver innovative customer-centered products."
|
| http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf
| samatman wrote:
| Wow _serious_ Baader-Meinhof effect!
|
| I recently downloaded all the PDFs from
| http://worrydream.com/refs/, and was reading Larry Tesler's _A
| Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut-Copy-Paste_ on
| my flight Monday.
|
| It's a good paper, you can find it at the link above if you're in
| the mood to read it _in memoriam_.
| Scobleizer wrote:
| Two tech legends left us this week: Larry Tesler and Bert
| Sutherland. Both played key roles at PARC, the research center
| Xerox started that sparked large chunks of what we use today.
|
| Regarding Tesler: I sat next to him when I flew back from
| interviewing at Microsoft. He was in the last row on the plane. I
| saw his Blackberry, assumed he was a nerd. He had just left
| Apple, was on the committee that hired Steve Jobs. He had his
| fingers in so much of the tech that we use today from object
| oriented programming to the Newton that set the stage for the
| iPhone.
|
| Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer,
| the tech of microprocessors, the Smalltalk and Java programming
| languages, and much more.
|
| Huge losses for our industry.
| smarky0x7CD wrote:
| Also Peter Montgomery.
|
| Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and
| secure elliptic curve cryptography.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| Yes. I discovered Montgomery Multiplication from the book
| Hacker's Delight. Potentially very useful for me.
|
| Yesterday I looked at the wiki page for that, followed the
| link to Peter Montgomery's wiki page, and thought I'd send
| him a little thank-you just for that (I had no idea of his
| crypto work, none at all). Then I noticed he had died that
| very day, yesterday, Feb 18th 2020, age 72. I wish I'd just
| been able to send him that little thank-you. I missed that
| window by a few hours.
| linguae wrote:
| I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's
| headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news.
|
| The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism.
| With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm
| most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced
| Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about
| advancing the state of research in the areas of programming
| languages, systems software, and human-computer interaction.
| There were many great people that were part of this group,
| including Larry Tesler and Don Norman. I completely understand
| why Steve Jobs shut down this group in 1997; times were rough for
| Apple, and the company couldn't afford to do research when its
| core business was in dire straits. But I wish Apple revived this
| group when its fortunes changed, and I also wish Apple still had
| the focus on usability and improving the personal computing
| experience that it had in the 1980s and 1990s.
| briancof wrote:
| $TSLERQ
| kristianp wrote:
| There's one thing on his wikipedia page which I think is probably
| wrong: I don't think Wirth had any involvement with Object
| Pascal.
| mikelevins wrote:
| I met Larry in about 1992 when I went to work on the Newton
| project. I had seen him around Apple before, and I knew who he
| was and what he was known for, but I didn't actually meet him
| until I joined the Newton team. I found him friendly, modest,
| smart, shrewd, compassionate, full of interesting knowledge and
| ideas, and interested in other people and their ideas.
|
| I got to know him better when John Sculley ordered him to have
| the Newton team ditch its Lisp OS and write one in C++. Larry
| approached me and a couple of other Lisp hackers and asked us to
| make a fresh start with Lisp and see what we could do on Newton.
| We wrote an experimental OS that Matt Maclaurin named "bauhaus".
|
| Larry had a sabbatical coming up right about then. He took it
| with us. He crammed into a conference room with three or four of
| us and hacked Lisp code for six weeks. He was a solid Lisp
| hacker. He stayed up late with us and wrote AI infrastructure for
| the experimental OS, then handed it off to me when he had to, as
| he put it, "put his executive hat back on." He hung around with
| us brainstorming and arguing about ideas. He had us out to his
| house for dinner.
|
| A little later, when things were hectic and pressure was high on
| Newton, one of our colleagues killed himself. Larry roamed the
| halls stopping to talk to people about how they were doing. I was
| at my desk when he came by, next to another colleague that I
| considered a friend. Larry stopped by to check on us. My friend
| had also been a good friend of the fellow who had died, and he
| lost his composure. Larry grabbed a chair, pulled it up close and
| sat with him, an arm around him, patting him gently while his
| grief ran its course.
|
| After Newton was released, Larry moved on to other projects. I
| worked on the shipped product for a while, but I was pretty
| burned out. Steve Jobs persuaded me to go to work for NeXT for a
| little while.
|
| Steve is infamous for being, let's say, not as pleasant as Larry.
| In fact, he sat in my office once trashing Larry for about half
| an hour, for no good reason, as far as I can see. I politely
| disagreed with a number of his points. Larry made important
| contributions to the development of personal computing, and he
| didn't have to be a jerk to do it.
|
| Larry was extremely smart, but I never knew him to play
| I'm-smarter-than-you games. I saw him encourage other people to
| pursue, develop, and share their ideas. I found him eager to
| learn new things, and more interested in what good we could do
| than in who got the credit for it.
|
| We weren't close friends, except maybe when we were crammed in a
| conference room together for six weeks. I didn't see him much
| after Newton, though we exchanged the occasional friendly email
| over the years.
|
| I was just thinking lately that it was about time to say hello to
| him again. Oops.
|
| Larry Tesler was one of the best people I met in Silicon Valley.
| He was one of the best people I've met, period. I'll miss him.
| tus88 wrote:
| Surprised I have not heard of him. He seems quite significant.
| GuiA wrote:
| A reminder that our industry is very young still, and many who
| laid its foundations are still with us today, but won't be
| forever.
|
| There is no better time than now for collecting oral history,
| interviewing people, asking them about their stories, etc. All of
| this knowledge and stories can get lost very very fast.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And, pretty basic, but _thank them for their contribution_.
| Plenty of the stuff we take for granted should not be taken for
| granted at all, it took a lot of dedicated people working on
| machines that were severely limited to give us the luxuries we
| have today and believe that it has always been so. It wasn 't.
| [deleted]
| bobbiechen wrote:
| Rest in peace. It's incredible how young computing is, many of
| his contributions are so fundamental.
|
| From a guest lecture Larry Tesler gave at CMU in 2014 [1]:
|
| _Click to select an insertion point. Double click to select a
| word. Click and drag to select a passage. All of those were new.
| Type to replace the selection by new text [...] I think that was
| not unprecedented, but it wasn't common. Cut to move the
| selection to a buffer, Pentti Kanurva had done it, tvedit. Paste
| to replace the selection by the buffer. Again, Pentti had done
| that [...] Control B to bold the selection, I and U and so on
| [...] All of these things were introduced in Gypsy, 1975._
|
| Gypsy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)
|
| [1]
| https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...
| dmazin wrote:
| He gave us so much more than cut, copy, paste. It's clear from
| all the design history books that I've read that he's a
| legend.[1]
|
| NO MODES!
|
| https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes...
|
| [1] One of the more rare sources for Larry Tesler's contributions
| is his interview for Bill Moggridge's Designing Interactions
| (http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler)
| modeless wrote:
| The inspiration for my username.
| nattaylor wrote:
| If you want to watch the interview and have trouble with flash,
| you can download
| http://www.designinginteractions.com/fla/LarryTesler.flv and
| then ffplay it.
| jolmg wrote:
| The Wikipedia article for Cut, Copy, and Paste[1] seems to have
| this bit that's cited to that book:
|
| > Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a
| move or copy operation into two steps--between which the user
| could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation--Lawrence
| G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy"
| for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning
| in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto
| Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that
| used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.
|
| I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers to
| vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save as if
| killed", and yank. I wonder what other editors had back then,
| before the names he came up with became standardized.
|
| I also wonder how the idea of the operations developed before
| Larry Tesler contributed to it.
|
| Looking at POSIX[2], it seems ex has delete, yank, and put, but
| I can't see similar functionality in standard ed (GNU's ed does
| have yank, but I guess it's an extension).
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Populariz...
|
| [2] https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
| tyfon wrote:
| Douglas Engelbart demonstrated copy/paste with a mouse in
| 1968 [1], however I'm not sure what he called the process. It
| was also very much an experimental system and not something
| for sale.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
| jcynix wrote:
| There's more than emacs or vi in "editor history" e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_%28software%29 and
| follow-ups at Xerox PARC.
| fsckboy wrote:
| TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple
| storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with
| letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer,
| and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in
| the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of
| characters forward or back relative to the current cursor
| position, with additional notions such as "here to
| beginning/end of line" or "n lines back/forward from cursor"
|
| TECO commands were typed in as code, essentially, and that
| code could also be saved and run as macros.
|
| it was extremely powerful, such that emacs was originally
| written as TECO Edit MACros.
| wnoise wrote:
| Ah! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to
| with the q command.
| [deleted]
| kragen wrote:
| > _I imagine those "early line and character editors" refers
| to vi's delete, yank, and put, and emacs's kill, copy/"save
| as if killed", and yank._
|
| No, 1974 predates both vi and Emacs
| jolmg wrote:
| You're right, I missed that. Vi's predecessor ex, which
| also had these operations, is from '76, so it also couldn't
| be it. However, Emacs's TECO, which also had yank, is from
| '62/'63, so that might've been one.
| musicale wrote:
| Very sad, Larry Tesler was brilliant and an inspiration.
|
| Smalltalk, copy-and-paste, the Apple Lisa/Macintosh and Newton,
| Object Pascal (predecessor of Delphi), Stagecast Creator... NO
| MODES. ;-)
|
| Pretty sure there isn't any bit of personal computing that Larry
| Tesler couldn't (or didn't) help make better somehow.
| pgt wrote:
| I loved Larry Tesler's work. No modes!
| gdubs wrote:
| Sad news; total legend. folklore.org has a lot of stories
| featuring Larry -- short stories on an era of computing that has
| faded around the edges. RIP.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I'm very sorry to hear this. He was the instigator of Dylan and
| it's not wrong to say there would be no Clozure Common Lisp (my
| preferred development platform) today if not for Larry Tesler.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man
| attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my
| mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent.
| In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just
| around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One
| year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled
| with networking gear I desperately needed for a "M"MORPG game I
| was building. The return label read
| "53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50". In the game,
| players were elves scrambling to defeat a corrupted workshop. The
| final boss was Satan Santa himself.
|
| It was only when I was older that I appreciated that he had
| probably sent me thousands of dollars worth of gear (and not in
| 2020 dollars!) in addition to the invaluable advice he provided,
| sometimes (frankly, often) unsolicited but always direct and
| always thought provoking.
|
| While I never did become an extremely competent commercial
| developer, to this day I enjoy programming for programming's own
| sake. Larry's push for me to fix my own headaches, rather than
| simply giving me a metaphorical aspirin, resulted in my
| development of solutions for small hobby problems that it
| appeared often only myself and perhaps a few others shared.
|
| As it turns out, in spite of (or thanks to) my niche interests,
| my curiosity and the method of targeted problem solving Larry
| fostered set me on a path I remain on today. Frankly, his
| contributions helped mold me as a man more than those of any
| other mentor of mine; that is absolutely meant as a compliment to
| his prescient pedagogy, rather than a slight at my life's many
| other wonderful influences.
|
| I've sold a few businesses thanks to Larry's problem solving
| approach. The rest I founded are running profitably - and somehow
| I've never lost an investor money. My customers have always,
| above all else, been happy because they had their problems fixed.
| (Or, perhaps thanks to his influence, their happiness stemmed
| from my teams simply providing them with the tools they needed to
| solve their own problems!)
|
| And because I followed Larry's personal advice, I have been able
| to spend every day for nearly two decades doing what he
| encouraged and what has consistently engaged me: finding,
| isolating and destroying problems.
|
| Thank you for everything.
| zarmin wrote:
| Great story, thanks for sharing.
| zymhan wrote:
| Wow, that is quite the gesture.
| Jupe wrote:
| Cute... 53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50 = SANTA
| AND HIS WORKSHOP
| burnJS wrote:
| Don't mode me bro.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I couldn't find any corroboration of this. What happened?
| mindcrime wrote:
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-...
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am sorry to hear that. I once had lunch with him and John Koza
| (pioneer in genetic programming) around the 1994 time period.
|
| Larry had the first book I wrote (Common Lisp book for Springer
| Verlag) and in a good natured way was trying to talk me into
| writing a book on Dylan. We kept in touch but I didn't write a
| Dylan book. Talking with him and John for an hour was like
| getting a year's worth of good ideas tossed at you, all at once.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| I think you guys dehumanize these people by reducing them to one
| or two sentences about computers. You havent lost this man. You
| didnt even know him.
| mindcrime wrote:
| You don't necessarily need to know someone personally to feel a
| sense of loss. You can feel a "bond" with with someone based on
| all sorts of things: being members of a common community,
| sharing a common occupation, etc., etc.
|
| To illustrate one case that hits close to home for me... when I
| think about the 343 firefighters who were killed on 9/11, I
| find it difficult not to tear up at times. Even though I never
| met any of them, and couldn't tell you any of their names. But
| we shared a common bond, by virtue of being firefighters. My
| sense of loss at their death is rooted in how deeply I admire
| all of them for the bravery and courage they displayed on that
| day, putting their lives on the line in the name of saving
| others. Do I feel that as strongly as if I had been the literal
| biological sibling of one them? Possibly not, but they were
| still my brothers, and the sense of loss is still real.
| mturmon wrote:
| Without piling on: sometimes this is how you _get_ to know
| someone.
|
| It used to be interesting to scan the obit section of
| newspapers, just to see the parade of characters and
| achievements that I had missed or not known enough of.
| Shebanator wrote:
| Some of us actually did know him. I did, albeit not as well as
| others here, and I see no harm and much good in people
| celebrating his accomplishments in his chosen career.
| ColinWright wrote:
| Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Here is Larry's Smalltalk article from the August 1981 BYTE,
| complete with a photo of the famous T-shirt that a mutual friend
| made for him: DON'T MODE ME IN
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/...
| dazrafio wrote:
| So long our dear friend Larry. You have been such an inspiration.
| Amongst other achievements, the Newton is still such an
| incredible machine (and love Dylan)
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