Computer History Museum

Tesler, Larry oral history, part 1 of 3

<p>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getting hired at Xerox PARC, his work creating the PUB electronic publishing program at SAIL, and why it was eventually superceded by Don Knuth&rsquo;s TeX, Tesler&rsquo;s relationship with Alan Kay, Tesler&rsquo;s work on POLOS and then becoming a free agent working with Kay&rsquo;s Smalltalk group, the beginning of usability studies at PARC, leading to empirical verification of Tesler&rsquo;s hypothesis that modes were bad, Tesler&rsquo;s contribution to Smalltalk and BitBLT, his views of object-oriented programming, the MacApp framework at Apple, Gypsy and Ginn Publishing, Tim Mott&rsquo;s invention of double-click, choosing to have only one mouse button, Tesler&rsquo;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.</p>

Item Details

Date
2016-11-22 (Made)
Type
Moving Image
Catalogue number
102717252
Organization
Computer History Museum (Publisher)
People
Hansen Hsu (Interviewer)
David C. Brock (Interviewer)
Larry Tesler (Interviewee)
Category
Oral History
Format
MOV
Credit line
Computer History Museum
Extent
03:00:22
Place of publication
North America/USA/CA/Mountain View
Language
English
Acquisition number
X8020.2017
Archive collection
CHM Oral History Collection
Archive hierarchy
Oral History collection