Apple’s former chief scientist Lawrence Tesler dies at 74

Lawrence Gordon Tesler, the computer scientist behind copy and paste (and much more) has died at 74.

Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in California. After graduating, he specialized in user interface design. He worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!

While at PARC, Tesler’s work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object-oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface for the Xerox Alto. He and colleague Tim Mott developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. 

While at Xerox, Steve Jobs poached him for Apple, where he spent 17 years and rose to chief scientist. At Apple, Tesler worked on the Apple Lisa and the Apple Newton. Copy and paste commands were  ncorporated in Apple’s software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year.

After leaving Apple, he worked at Stagecast, an education software startup that was spun out of Apple, and also spent time at Amazon, Yahoo, and 23andMe. Since 2009, he had been a UX consultant based in California.