Artifact Details

Title

Tesler, Larry oral history, part 2 of 3

Catalog Number

102717269

Type

Document

Description

Larry Tesler was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, being a neighbor of Fred Moore, and got into building hobbyist microcomputers, as well as writing articles for People’s Computer Magazine. Tesler’s involvement with the NoteTaker was via Doug Fairbairn, who believed that with sufficiently good design tools, a software person could develop hardware, and Tesler served as a good test subject by helping design parts of the NoteTaker. Because of his familiarity with hobbyist computing, he was able to solve a problem for the NoteTaker by looking up a solution in Byte magazine. Tesler would later write articles for the August 1981 Byte special issue on Smalltalk as well as chapters of the official Smalltalk books. Tesler describes the famous demos that PARC did for Apple and Steve Jobs. After these demos Tesler left Xerox for Apple because he could see that microcomputers available to consumers was going to be the future, and that Apple could really do something with PARC’s technology. Tesler discusses debates at Apple about how many buttons should be on the mouse, Jef Raskin’s role in setting up the PARC demos to Apple, how Tesler got to Apple, his first days there, getting on the Lisa project, differences between the Lisa user interface and the Xerox Star interface, starting usability studies at Apple for the Lisa, collaborating with Bill Atkinson on the Lisa user interface, relations between the Lisa and Macintosh teams, how Lisa ToolKit led to MacApp, creating Object Pascal with Niklaus Wirth, and Smalltalk’s influence on design patterns.

Date

2016-12-16

Contributor

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

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Extent

49 p.

Format

PDF

Category

Transcription

Subject

Homebrew Computer Club; NoteTaker; Fairbairn, Douglas; Smalltalk (Computer programming language); Xerox PARC; Rulifson, Jeff; Jobs, Steve; Goldberg, Adele; Atkinson, Bill; Raskin, Jef; Horn, Bruce; Daniels, Bruce; Lisa (Computer); Xerox Star; Espinosa, Chris; MacApp; Clascal; Object Pascal; Wirth, Niklaus

Collection Title

CHM Oral History Collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8020.2017

Related Records

102717270 Tesler, Larry oral history, part 2 of 3