Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com)
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
162 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadSmalltalk, 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.
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.
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.
Legend in cryptography who created many algorithms for fast and secure elliptic curve cryptography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Montgomery_(mathematicia...
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.
https://queeniehui.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/designing-intera...
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:
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n103/...A couple of other good articles:
https://gizmodo.com/1841787408
https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/larry-tesler-1945-2020-b91...
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)
> 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/
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.
EDIT: Maybe not:
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12081/why...
In nvi, I just key my commands on a scratch line (testing occasionally), then:
to load the whole line (yy) into buffer ‘x’ (“x). Execution (@x) thereafter looks ~same.[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
No, 1974 predates both vi and Emacs
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cut,_copy,_and_paste
Here's a nice bit:
> I chose Z/X/C/V when I was in charge of the user interface design of Apple's Lisa. In addition to their adjacency on the keyboard, I wanted them to have mnemonic value: "X" a cross-out; "V" an inverted caret or proofreader's arrowhead; "C" the first letter of "copy"; the strokes of "Z" tracing a reversal followed by a new path forward. -- Larry Tesler
> Correction: Apparently, my memory was incorrect. The Lisa user interface seems to have used "U" for Undo. On the Mac (as in Gypsy), "U" was and is for Underline. I do not know who chose "Z" for Mac Undo, or why. I suspect that its proximity to the Command key was the reason. -- Larry Tesler
There's more, but it's too much to insert here.
I'm just hoping this isn't someone posing as Larry Tesler.
Is it a blanket rule for him for all interfaces, or just text editors?
The basic idea is that modes make the same action (pressing the "D" key, for example) do different things. They make things easier for programmers who want many operations on machines that only have a few possible actions, but they make things hard for the user who have to pay attention to the current mode and know how to navigate from that to the mode where the desired operation is possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040511051426/https://computerh...
Fascinating because that exploratory process is essentially what we recognize as "graphical user interface" as of today, and the whole industry has committed itself to that particular design, to the point that exploring how to build interfaces from any other set of principles feels like a titanic task.
i have a .vimrc file that set C-C/C-X/C-V to work in each mode; that gets me the best of both worlds: fast text navigation in normal mode as i can switch to the next/previous word with w/b; but I can still copy and paste (limits us to one buffer, though; nothing is perfect)
https://github.com/MoserMichael/myenv/blob/master/VIMENV.md
"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
The Apple and Xerox segments are nothing short of astonishing.
Championed the spinout of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) from Acorn plc and served on ARM’s board for 13 years.
That turned out fairly well....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not the same impact as the video interview in Designing for Interactions but covers a lot of ground from Larry Tesler’s perspective.
“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.
Ctrl-X + Ctrl-V
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.
Those numbers represent the hex ascii code.
To get you started.
53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50
53 = S
41 = A
4e = N
...
a="53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50"
"".join([chr(int(a[i:(i+2)],16)) for i in range(0,len(a),2)])
=> 'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'
a = 'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'
"".join([hex(ord(c)) for c in a]).replace('0x','')
=> '53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50'
>>> bytes.fromhex('53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50')
b'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'
>>> b'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'.hex()
'53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50'
Did he encourage you do be you ?
Are you You because of him, maybe not, because its impossible to grade.
But here you are paying respect to a man that you met, so I would say: he had an impact on you. Even at that moment.
We could play highschool politics and as what you learnt from him.
But from your message it's clear.
I never met him personally, but I certainly felt his impact.
RIP