Artifact Details

Title

Tesler, Larry oral history, part 1 of 3

Catalog Number

102717251

Type

Document

Description

Larry Tesler had been interested in computer usability since he first encountered a computer at Bronx High School of Science. Tesler discusses how his involvement with the counterculture got him interested in printing and publishing, his Stanford football card stunt program, how the programming consulting company he started got involved with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) and psychologist Ken Colby, the origins of cut, copy and paste, getting hired at Xerox PARC, his work creating the PUB electronic publishing program at SAIL, and why it was eventually superceded by Don Knuth’s TeX, Tesler’s relationship with Alan Kay, Tesler’s work on POLOS and then becoming a free agent working with Kay’s Smalltalk group, the beginning of usability studies at PARC, leading to empirical verification of Tesler’s hypothesis that modes were bad, Tesler’s contribution to Smalltalk and BitBLT, his views of object-oriented programming, the MacApp framework at Apple, Gypsy and Ginn Publishing, Tim Mott’s invention of double-click, choosing to have only one mouse button, Tesler’s work on a prototype page layout application, designing a processor board and an Ethernet board for the NoteTaker, and creating the Smalltalk browser and development environment.

Date

2016-11-22

Contributor

Brock, David C., Interviewer
Hsu, Hansen, Interviewer
Tesler, Larry, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Extent

50 p.

Format

PDF

Category

Transcription

Subject

Publishing applications; counterculture; Stanford; Engelbart, Doug; Colby, Ken; PARRY; SAIL; Xerox PARC; cut copy and paste; modeless editing; PUB; Knuth, Donald; TeX; English, Bill; POLOS; Gypsy; Ginn Publishing; Mott, Tim; Kay, Alan; double-click; Ingalls, Dan; Smalltalk (Computer programming language); BitBLT; Object-oriented programming (Computer science); MacApp; NoteTaker; IDE; Model-View-Controller

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8020.2017

Related Records

102717252 Tesler, Larry oral history, part 1 of 3