

Larry Tesler Has Died - drallison
https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408
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.  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Larry_Tesler" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Larry_Tesler</a>
======
alankay
I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group,
manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert
Sutherland.

There is an excellent obit for Larry at: [https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-
modeless-computing-advocat...](https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-
computing-advocate-has-passed-1841787408)

... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his --
in the NYTimes.

In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much influence
in too many areas for there to be any chance to characterize him technically.
In short, he was a superb wide-spectrum(real) computer scientist who was also
a very talented and skilled programmer.

His passing was sudden and unexpected, and I may return later to this note to
add more details of his rich career.

For now, I remember him as great to work with in all aspects of his life. He
was a great guy, and perhaps that sums him up as best as can be.

~~~
oblio
Is anyone from Parc still involved in research these days? Or is everyone
retired or just chugging along at regular corporate jobs?

~~~
alankay
Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing
research.

Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less
forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks
wound up doing further research.

But Butler Lampson (the "Oppenheimer" of Parc) is still going strong, as am I
and many others.

It was a calling, never a job.

~~~
Aloha
When I was 17-18, I read 'Dealers of Lightning' it clued me into the
foundations laid for modern computing in the 60-70's in the Bay Area (between
SRI, CSAIL and PARC), and markedly changed my own approach to information and
computing.

I've always wondered how those who were featured in the book felt about it?

~~~
alankay
The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA)
is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and
most accurate.

"Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level but far from the bottom. Its flaws
are too much "Heroes' Journey" and a very complex and confused jumping around
timeline (I had trouble myself orienting in some of the spots). But it also
has a lot of good stories, of which a reasonable number are "true enough".

"Fumbling The Future" is extremely inaccurate.

~~~
Aloha
Thanks! I'll add that one onto my reading queue.

I actually didn't have too much trouble following Dealers, because it (more or
less) mostly followed each project separately, which while creating an
interspersed timeline in the book, was mostly coherent within each section.

I did read at least part of Fumbling, but I found it a hard book to thread the
needle on, and it was in such stark factual disagreement with what else I'd
read that I don't recall finishing it.

I know too many who draw the same conclusions from the Alto and related
technologies that fumbling does, so I try to get people to read more about
PARC, because I'll hope that once they know more they'll draw much the same
conclusions I have - My frustration with much of the traditional criticism of
Xerox in failing to commercialize the PARC innovations is it completely
ignores both the high cost of the technology (it was literally the technology
of the future) and the sales culture of technology at the time.

I don't think any large technology company (which Xerox was broadly) could
have made something wondrous out of the innovations PARC created because the
people who could recognize the value (and use) of this kind of technology were
not the people being sold to, or for that matter doing the buying - nor did
they have the budgets to buy a Alto, as was later seen with the Star when it
came out.

It took direct to consumer sales (allowing department managers to buy stuff),
and lower cost products to allow personal computing to penetrate into the home
and corporate america - also the traditional criticism completely ignores that
the 9700 (and follow on products) paid for the money spent at PARC several
times over.

(incidentally, I believe that this sales culture issue is a prime reason why
DEC no longer exists as a company because they failed to see that their market
was shifting and could no longer be sold thru the same mechanisms they always
had been)

In the end, basic research and the undirected applied science that flows from
it is important, even if it has no direct tie to your line of business,
because it's the innovation that drives a company forward, and frankly drives
_humanity_ forward. I wish more people knew that modern interconnected the
world we live in was built on billions spent with no firm idea of what would
result from them, and how much of a debt we owe to PARC, Bell Labs and others.

Also, thank you for taking the time to respond to my question!

~~~
alankay
Yes, the separate timelines of "Dealers" quite missed the cross fertilization
and synergies of Parc (which were its main unusual features), so to me, this
is a real drawback to this book. On the other hand, "systems" don't parse well
into sequences, and Parc was a system, and thus needs something more like a 2D
or 3D or 4D chart to do a decent explanation.

There are at least two big issues regarding cost that many people miss: (a)
the first is the difference between what should be spent on "prototypes for
learning and vetting" and what can be done when designing for manufacturing,
and (b) the second is the the difficulty most people had with valuing what
personal computing might be for them.

In the first public paper I wrote about the Dynabook I pointed out that
Moore's Law meant that powerful tablet sized personal computers would likely
wind up costing what a color TV set would cost (they would have pretty similar
components, and most of the cost in electronics is in packaging).

But we also had another analogy that we though could work via education: that
of the personal automobile in the US. People value cars enough to be willing
to pay quite a bit more for them than for most consumer devices. This was very
interesting because the ARPA dream of an interactive personal computer
connected to a world-wide network was a kind of "information and intelligence
vehicle".

If people could see this, then they might be willing to pay what they would
pay for a car. Certainly most computer people and most scientists and
engineers would be able to assign value in this way. We thought most knowledge
workers would eventually be able to see this also, and that there would be an
intermediate phase before getting to the TV set kind of technologies.

An analysis of what happened to eventually quash this idea is beyond the scope
of this note. (But, to make a point in talks, I've tried to get people to
think about what "a car's worth" of personal computer could be like (the
average car in the US a few years ago was a Toyota Avalon at $28K, so about 10
times what most personal computers go for).

This is a different slant than the problem that DEC and similar companies had
(which was to not be able to understand personal computing in any reasonable
form).

------
atdrummond
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 S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ 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.

~~~
Jupe
Cute... 53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50 = SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP

~~~
dooglius
Ha, I was wondering how you managed to reverse the hash and then had a
facepalm moment.

~~~
crobertsbmw
I still don’t get it.

~~~
sabujp
i use this one alot, it has various decryption tools and you can apply
"recipes" :
[https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=From_Hex('Auto')&in...](https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=From_Hex\('Auto'\)&input=NTM0MTRlNTQ0MTIwNDE0ZTQ0MjA0ODQ5NTMyMDU3NGY1MjRiNTM0ODRmNTA)

~~~
bzavados
nice!!

------
mikelevins
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.

~~~
lukego
(I'm having trouble with this seeming to be a feel-good anecdote about a high-
pressure working environment in which people are burning out and killing
themselves.)

~~~
mikelevins
I suppose that, in part, it's exactly what you say it is.

If it's a feel-good story, I think that must be because I feel good to have
had the opportunity to meet and work with Larry Tesler. He impressed me with
his intelligence, his generosity, and his compassion. I feel that I'm better
for having known him, and I suppose that comes through in my account.

You're right: Newton was a pressure cooker. Larry didn't put that pressure on
us, though. We put it on ourselves. We got the idea that there was an outside
chance of making something great, and we pursued that dream as hard as we
could. Some of us--I include myself--were intemperate in that pursuit, and it
cost us.

Now, the pursuit of greatness is a species of vanity, and vanity is a cruel
and fickle master. But in Newton's case, at least, I think those of us who
were seduced by that vanity have only ourselves to blame.

~~~
lukego
Thanks for the context!

------
alariccole
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
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.

~~~
chris_wot
It’s ok, I think anyone would realise that the fact he gave you a lift meant
he was a pretty nice guy. I really enjoyed reading your story. I’m sorry you
lost a friend.

------
Stratoscope
Oh my, Larry was only 74? That is far too young.

We were friends, off and on. Perhaps somewhat "off" after I stole his
girlfriend. (In my defense, it was her idea!) But that was 35 years ago, and
all was forgiven (and hopefully forgotten) in more recent years.

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/...](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1981-08/page/n103/mode/1up)

A couple of other good articles:

[https://gizmodo.com/1841787408](https://gizmodo.com/1841787408)

[https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-
tesler-1945-2020-b91...](https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-
tesler-1945-2020-b910429f12eb)

------
dmazin
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...](https://itsthedatastupid.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/nomodes.jpg)

[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](http://www.designinginteractions.com/interviews/LarryTesler))

~~~
jolmg
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste#Popularization)

[2]
[https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/)

~~~
fsckboy
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
Ah! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to with the q command.

~~~
bch
I was confused by the ‘q’ command in vi, so I did quick testing (in nvi(1))
and scanned vim cheat sheets. I still don’t know what ‘q’ does in the named
buffer context - help?

~~~
okal
Recording macros, I think.

~~~
bch
Looks like you’re correct![0]

In nvi, I just key my commands on a scratch line (testing occasionally), then:

    
    
       “xyy
    

to load the whole line (yy) into buffer ‘x’ (“x). Execution (@x) thereafter
looks ~same.

[0] [https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros](https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros)

------
ChuckMcM
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
Which side of the debate was he on personally?

~~~
ChuckMcM
He was very much in favor of modeless design, which emacs is much closer to
than vi is. My argument was that emacs still has modes, operationally. You can
make it a debugger, a mail reader, or a text editor by invoking code that puts
it in that "mode." So the discussion quickly becomes what is meant by 'mode'
and how are operational modes different than semantic modes which are
different than presentation modes. If you haven't guessed it was pretty
memorable for me, it helped me see some insights into the difference between
design and engineering.

------
linguae
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.

~~~
mikelevins
Larry was influential in the development and the missions of both ATG and the
Human Interface Group, both of which are now gone now. He believed in
conducting practical experiments with users and collecting objective
measurements of how well UI worked. He wanted to find general principles that
could be used to make all software better for everyone.

Steve Jobs killed both ATG and HIG. I think your point about times being rough
and money being tight are valid, but three years earlier Steve Jobs sat in my
office at NeXT and told me that if it was up to him, Apple would kill ATG and
HIG--not because they were expensive, but because, in his words, they had too
much influence.

Sure enough, when he took over Apple again, he wasted no time in killing them
and replacing them with himself.

You're probably right that cutting those expenses was important to Apple's
recovery. I think your other point is right, too, though: we'd be better off
if Apple--or somebody--reconstituted something like HIG to show the industry
what's possible if you take user experience and human-computer interaction
seriously.

Unfortunately, Larry can't help us with it this time.

~~~
audiometry
"he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself."

ooh ouch that's a sharp, and understated, line!

------
svat
In the late 1960s/early 1970s, before he went to Xerox PARC and Apple, Larry
Tesler wrote an early document system (page formatter) called PUB, for use by
other computer programmers at the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL). He has put up the
old manual online at
[http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html](http://www.nomodes.com/pub_manual.html)
with some modern annotations. This PUB was influential in at least two ways:

\- It was Donald Knuth's first introduction to computer typesetting, and he
used to use this program as a convenient way to prepare errata for _The Art of
Computer Programming_ on a computer, and hand out the resulting printouts. (At
that time he was thinking of computer tools as something like typewriters and
in no way related to "real book printing", until he saw the result of a "real"
digital typesetter in 1977, which inspired him to write TeX.) In 2012 when he
learned of this manual he wrote in TUGboat strongly recommending it to others:
[https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf](https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb33-3/tb105knut.pdf)

\- Another of its users was Brian Reid, who went on to develop Scribe, which
itself was influential in two ways: (1) It was a strong influence on Leslie
Lamport's LaTeX (in fact LaTeX can be viewed as bringing Scribe syntax/ideas
to TeX), and (2) It seems to have been influential in the development of
markup languages in general, e.g. from GML to SGML (this part I'm not sure of
and there are conflicting accounts), which eventually led to HTML and XML. In
fact it would have been better than XML according to Douglas Crockford here:
[https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/...](https://nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/douglas_crockford/2007/06/scribe)

Here's an 8-minute video of him accepting an award at a SAIL reunion (I think)
for his work on PUB:
[https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949](https://exhibits.stanford.edu/ai/catalog/sj202sv1949)
(with some audience comments by John McCarthy and a joke by Knuth).

------
mark_l_watson
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.

------
Scobleizer
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
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_\(mathematician\))

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
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.

~~~
jose-cl
Keep studying for him, cheers

------
bobbiechen
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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_\(software\))

[1]
[https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=...](https://scs.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=e6adfb43-be90-46b3-9009-23cd98b7a898)

------
aresant
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](http://www.nomodes.com/Tesler_CV_Public.pdf)

~~~
musicale
Honest but overly modest summary. I picture hiring managers or AI throwing his
resumé away because he didn't have enough experience and was "out of date."

The Apple and Xerox segments are nothing short of astonishing.

------
loquor
I remember his mention in Bret Victor's talk, Inventing on Principle. He is
known for cut copy paste, but he did far more than that. He introduced a
single 'mode' for working for docs, as opposed to having typing, editing,
formatting modes. He lived his entire life by the 'nomodes' ethos; that's his
twitter handle to boot. I really respect that.

------
mc3
I'm bad at names, so I didn't know the name, but followed the Wikipedia link
and saw he was the "modeless" advocate, and I learned about that from this
awesome Bret Victor talk:
[https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366). Someone has
commented to forward to 38 minutes to hear it.

That Bret Victor talk still influences me today, so please watch it I think
it'll help you if you haven't watched it already.

------
samatman
Wow _serious_ Baader-Meinhof effect!

I recently downloaded all the PDFs from
[http://worrydream.com/refs/](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_.

------
sheri
I was in college, and attended a career fair for Amazon back in 2002. I was
not in my last year so I really went just for free food. It was quite sparse,
and after a while one guy with a friendly smile just walked up to me and said
"Hi, I'm Larry". We talked a little bit about my background, about Amazon and
opportunities there. I felt like I was a hotshot at the time, and quite
frankly didn't. Only after I went back to my dorm and looked him up did I
realize who I was talking to.

He was super humble, super nice. I acted like a jerk, thinking I was hot stuff
and everybody was there to court me and was there just for free pizza. Despite
being infinitely more accomplished than I could ever be, he was nice, engaging
and never treated me in kind.

Every so often I think back to that time and kick myself at the lost
opportunity to have a conversation with one of the legends of Silicon Valley.

Thank you Larry.

------
GuiA
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
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.

------
tobr
Larry Tesler was really convinced of the merits of modeless interfaces. He
even got “NOMODES” on his license plate.

[https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-
intera...](https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-interactions-
review-part-1/)

~~~
hawflakes
Was at 23andME when he was there, too. We (engineering) had no idea who he was
initially but I did notice his license plate "NO MODES." Only after we looked
him up and found that he had invented copy-paste did we realize he was a
living legend. Sad to see he's passed on.

------
musicale
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.

------
gdubs
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.

------
LanceKlass
This posting and Larry's obit take me back to the math applications class we
took at Bronx Science our senior year. Writing a program for the IBM 640 (yes,
the 640), coding the IBN cards ourselves and then the fateful experience of
loading the program cards into the reader for the 640 was a scary experience.
Larry's program apparently did primes while mine did the Fibonacci series.
Then the 640, the size of a modern SUV, chugged away all night and the next
day it generated voluminous print-out's, lots and lots of paper. What fun!

After graduation he went off to Stamford to continue math - and programming -
and I went elsewhere for liberal arts. But no matter, I couldn't have done
what Larry did or create what he created.

I remember him as a great guy, very mellow, and if memory serves he was on the
track team as well. Perfect for Stanford. Apparently he affected those he
worked with the same way he affected me - an easy-going guy, friendly,
positive, ready to smile. I know he'll be missed greatly.

------
dreamcompiler
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.

------
suyash
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
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.

------
alankay
A very nice remembrance by John Markoff in the NYTimes:
[https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9u...](https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9uOwZooDufhaU?reason=invalid_cred)

~~~
neonate
That link doesn't work for me, but these do:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-
tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-
dead.html)

[http://archive.md/J7bOw](http://archive.md/J7bOw)

~~~
alankay
Thanks!

------
spullara
One of the strangest moments in my career was Larry asking me for career
advice when we were both at Yahoo; I think because I had been an IC for really
long time and had figured out how to leverage that into strategic positions.
Great man with incredible accomplishments.

------
bsimpson
I've been meaning to watch one of his presentations for a while: "Origins of
the Apple Human Interface"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-
atKrg0T4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4)

------
drallison
Obits in the national press:

NYT: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-
tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-
dead.html)

WAPO: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-
tesler...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-tesler-
inventor-of-copy-and-paste-computer-functions-dies-
at-74/2020/02/20/e5699f6e-541c-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html)

------
yters
Wow reading the comments sounds like actually a great human being. Help me
realize being a jerk is an anti pattern, even though I am sometimes tempted to
think otherwise.

------
tus88
Surprised I have not heard of him. He seems quite significant.

------
ColinWright
Also here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558)

------
astatine
RIP Larry Tesler. I rather feel a worm for not being aware of him till today.
Nevertheless, hearing the many personal stories here on HN of his work,
humility and graciousness, make me thankful for him and his tribe that have
made the software profession so much more richer.

------
billman
Wow. I didn't realize how influential the Bronx High School of Science was:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bronx_High_School_of_Science_alumni)

------
marai2
From his resume:

1962-1964 Stanford University Departments of Genetics and Computer Science
programmer

------
davidhariri
I didn’t know of Larry Tesler, but reading the comments makes me want to lead
like he did. Looking forward to learning more about his life. My condolences
to his friends here.

------
dazrafio
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)

------
kristianp
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.

~~~
jdswain
I think he did, as a consultant. The main reference I found was an article in
MacTech, written by an Apple employee:

"Object Pascal is an extension to the Pascal language that was developed at
Apple in consultation with Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of Pascal."

[http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/Ob...](http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.12/ObjectPascal/index.html)

~~~
haeberli
I was (distantly) there, and I recall Wirth being there and visiting.

------
Tempora
RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.
RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.

------
pgt
I loved Larry Tesler’s work. No modes!

------
dkonofalski
Is it possible for the HN staff to put a rollover on the black bar or link it
to threads like this. I see an uptick in the "why is there a black bar?"
threads every time it goes up and it would be nice to acknowledge the people
that have contributed to technology and spread awareness of what they've done
for people that might not know.

------
burnJS
Don't mode me bro.

------
mister_hn
Never heard about him here in EU

------
bandrami
Larry Tesler has died (gizmodo.com)

1179 points by drallison 23 hours ago | flag | hide | past | web | favorite |
131 comments

------
ckaps
What

------
kianigreycliff
rest in peace

------
netuser1
Thank you, Larry.

------
lukaserat
:(

------
jakelazaroff
Tangentially related question: is this why HN currently has a black bar above
the navigation? To commemorate his death?

~~~
penagwin
Yes, HN does this when people who were impactful to the technology world have
died to commemorate them.

------
falcor84
I couldn't find any corroboration of this. What happened?

~~~
mindcrime
[https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-
who-...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/19/larry-tesler-who-showed-
steve-jobs-around-xerox-parc-dies-aged-74)

------
justlexi93
Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist.

He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience
technology at Amazon and Yahoo.

------
OrgNet
[https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png](https://imgur.com/KX9IJEV.png)

------
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
Does anyone else find it strange that there’s rarely any mention of cause of
death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?

~~~
pmcjones
Markoff's obituary [1] in the New York Times says, "The cause was not known,
his wife, Colleen Barton, said, but in recent years he had suffered the
effects of an earlier bicycle accident."

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-
tesle...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/technology/lawrence-tesler-
dead.html)

