Could you imagine creating something that becomes so ubiquitous that it is used the world over, by pretty much everyone from the age of 10 and above?
That’s what Larry Tesler did. I admit, until I read his obituary, Tesler was unfamiliar to me. Yet I have been using his inventions for decades. You see, he’s the computer scientist who invented “Copy, Cut and Paste” and “Find and Replace.”
It would be hard to find someone who has never used these commands — and most people either in school or in the workforce continue to use them on a daily basis.
Soon after Tesler passed away, another computing pioneer did too: Katherine Johnson. She was an actual “computer” at NASA, before computers were strictly machines.
It’s mind-boggling how much has changed on the tech frontier since the ‘70s, when Tesler developed copy, cut, paste, or the 1960s, when Johnson worked on the trajectory for Apollo 11’s flight to the moon.
To put it into perspective: a USB-C wall charger is more powerful than Apollo 11’s computer was!
In one of the buildings of ETH Zurich, one of Europe’s foremost technical universities, stands a Cray X-MP supercomputer from 1988. The device is huge: imagine six filing cabinets forming a circle. Yet each of these “cabinets” — no doubt cutting edge at the time — had a storage capacity of 1.2 GB. By comparison, today’s MacBook Pros have a baseline storage of 512 GB and can be configured up to 8 TB (that’s terabytes; one terabyte is equal to 1,000 GB).
Today’s technology barely resembles technology of decades past. Yet here we are, every day, still clicking Control or Command-C, followed by Command-X, followed by Command-Z. There’s something almost eternal about it.
Shana Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]
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