Larry Tesler, an icon of early computing, has died at the age of 74.
Mr
Tesler started working in Silicon Valley in the early 1960s, at a time
when computers were inaccessible to the vast majority of people.It was thanks to his innovations - which included the "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands - that the personal computer became simple to learn and use.
Xerox, where Mr Tesler spent part of his career, paid tribute to him.
"The inventor of cut/copy & paste, find & replace, and more, was former Xerox researcher Larry Tesler," the company tweeted. "Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas."
Mr Tesler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in California.
Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere.
The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year.
