I have to admit that I didn’t know that much about Larry Tesler prior to his passing last week. I was generally aware of Xerox PARC, and their place in the history of personal computing. And I probably had heard at some point that Tesler was essentially the inventor of “copy and paste.” And I think I was vaguely aware that he’d worked on the Newton, maybe? But I don’t think I’d ever put that all together in my mind, and realized that this was all the same guy. Over the years, it looks like he’s worked on a number of really cool things, from Smalltalk to Object Pascal to the Newton.

I first saw the news of his death on Hacker News, which linked to an obituary on Gizmodo. The Hacker News thread has some pretty interesting anecdotes and conversation, including a number of comments from Alan Kay. There’s also an obituary in the NY Times, written by John Markoff. And there’s a nice remembrance from Adam Engst at the TidBITS site.

I don’t have anything useful or pithy to say. I’m just here marveling at how much this guy did, and what a good guy he apparently was.