https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-lessons-to-copy-and-paste-11598215275
We all owe a debt to Larry Tesler, who died in February at the age of 74. I meant to write about him in March but reality intervened. Tesler isn’t generally considered one of the founding fathers of personal computing but he’s certainly a contributing cousin, including features I guarantee you use every day. His story contains lessons galore—see if you can catch ’em all.
Tesler was born in New York, and took an interest in computers as a kid when he learned they were being used to forecast elections. This was in the 1950s—and it’s still an art, not a science. While at the Bronx High School of Science, he somehow talked folks at Columbia University into granting him 30 minutes per week on an IBM 650. Per week! At 16 he trucked out to Stanford to study mathematics and, like everyone else, got involved in ’60s counterculture, and he eventually became a freelance coder.
In 1970, after a failed marriage, Tesler, along with his young daughter and a bunch of his friends moved to something like a commune in rural Oregon. In a 2005 oral history, Tesler recalls, “That was pretty cool but there was no income up there.” Fortunately, Alan Kay, who invented the easy-to-use Smalltalk programming system, was setting up an effort at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Mr. Kay wanted to hire Tesler but couldn’t find him. Happily for all of us, that whole commune thing didn’t work out.
Tesler joined Xerox PARC in 1973 and worked on the Online Office System and a user-friendly computer named Alto running Smalltalk. Looking for features, Tesler found a newly hired secretary, Sylvia Adams, who had only used a typewriter. “I grabbed her. I didn’t want her to get contaminated by some word processor that we were using”—her lack of exposure would provide a fresh perspective. He sat her in front of a monitor and asked what she would want to do with the document on the screen.
She told the furiously note-taking Tesler, “Well, I have to insert something there, so I would point there, and then I would type what I wanted. And to delete this, I would draw through it.” She also told him she wanted to drag text around and even copy it elsewhere. Voilà—Tesler created cut, copy and paste in a system named Gypsy. (I pasted just now!) He even invented the expression “Wysiwyg,” as in “what you see is what you get.” Tesler also worked on an early portable computer named NoteTaker. Xerox didn’t commercialize it, nor much of anything he developed.
In 1979 Xerox had negotiated to buy options for shares of Apple Computer. In exchange, Apple staff could tour PARC.
No surprise, after a year Tesler left PARC and joined Apple. There, he worked on two ahead-of-their-time failures: the Lisa computer, which eventually morphed into the reasonably priced Macintosh, and the Newton personal digital assistant, a forerunner of the iPod and iPhone. He also worked with early versions of Wi-Fi and the ARM processors now used in most smartphones.
Tesler left Apple in 1997 and worked at Amazon, Yahoo and the genomics company 23andMe. Looking back, Tesler admitted, “I wasn’t on a career ladder. I was on more of a career seesaw. Didn’t bother me. Come up with a new thing, grow it big, give it to somebody else, start over with a new thing.” Silicon Valley workers in a nutshell.
And those lessons? Here’s an even dozen: Follow your interests. Counterculture is OK, but change society by inventing the future, not protesting it. Don’t drop out. Communes fail. Find an unbiased person to discover new features. Ask lots of questions. Big companies are stifling and don’t ask lots of questions. Work for the person that does ask lots of questions. Watch out from below as something cheaper will eventually eat you. You can fail and still be part of progress. Job hopping can be a career. Do an oral history.
Years ago, I visited a game-developer friend at Apple and went directly to his building instead of reception. I had his phone number in a Notepad file on my iPhone, copied it, but couldn’t for the life of me paste it into the phone dialer. Instead I had to type it in number by number. I complained to my friend and then watched as he entered a new feature request into the Apple system.
A few months later, Apple announced its iPhone OS 3.1 software update, with “bug fixes and improvements,” including: “Paste phone numbers into the Keypad.” Hey, that’s my feature! OK, let’s call it the Tesler-Kessler feature. Only fair.
