As the inventor of copy and paste dies, here are other computing innovations we take for granted
bart in the 1960s, the device was refined at Xerox, where the first ball-mouse was developed.
Larry Tesler invented cut and paste, and coined the phrase “user-friendly”. Globally, we now send 188 million emails every minute of every day. 5G technology is expected to generate $3.6 trillion by 2035. His career in the technology sector spanned 50 years and was witness to many innovations that are now part of our daily lives.
The mouse revolutionized the way people interact with computers, getting away from the purely text-driven approach and ushering in the era of the graphical user interface that we are all familiar with today. 2. You’ve got mail Email was invented in the mid-1960s, too, and has become one of the most ubiquitous features of modern life. Some would say a little too ubiquitous.
In 1961, Larry Tesler went to study at Stanford University, which itself has been pivotal to the growth of Silicon Valley. It’s where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard met before founding the company that bears their name; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, studied there too, as did Elon Musk.
Every minute of every day, 188 million emails are sent and more than half of them are spam. In the early 1970s, when the @ symbol was first integrated into email addressing protocols, the only people with access to an email mailbox were users of The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). That was the first wide-area network and connected dozens of universities across the United States. 3. On the move
Tesler worked at some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley: Apple, Xerox, and Yahoo. He also worked briefly at Amazon. The pioneering computer scientist believed passionately that computers needed to be easy to use, and is credited by some as having coined the phrase “user-friendly”.
The chances are you’re reading this on something other than a desktop. Everyone takes for granted the ability to take their computer with them, whether it’s a laptop, a tablet or even their smartphone.
In the 1970s, he developed the cut/copy and paste function that is now so widely used that it’s hard to imagine not being able to Ctrl-X/Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.
The very first vision for a mobile computer dates back to the 1970s, when Alan Kay, a researcher at Xerox PARC, had an idea for something he called the Dynabook. Apart from a cardboard mock-up, nothing came of it. But in 1981, the world was introduced to the Osborne 1 – the first portable computer. It had a 13cm screen that could only display 52 characters on each line of text. If you wanted one, it would have set you back $1,795. It was basic by any modern standards, but the Osborne 1 sounded the starting pistol for the race to
Here are some of the biggest innovations in computing the world has seen since Tesler first started at Stanford... 1. Mouse tales One of the other big computing breakthroughs of the 1970s took place at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Tesler worked. It was the mouse. Although the initial concept for the mouse dates back to the work of Douglas EngelThe Source
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