The Last Word

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

 

 

 

[Bazza]

It was Larry who gave Steve Jobs the demonstration at Xerox PARC that changed Apple towards implementing a GUI; first with Lisa, and then with the Macintosh. 

 

 

[Bazza]

from the NYT obit:

 

"The Gypsy program offered such innovations as the “cut and paste” analogy for moving blocks of text and the ability to select text by dragging the cursor through it while holding down a mouse button. It also shared with an earlier Xerox editor, Bravo, what became known as “what you see is what you get” printing (or WYSIWYG), a phrase Mr. Tesler used to describe a computer display that mirrored printed output."

 

without WYSIWYG, there would likely have not been desktop publishing. 

[Bazza]

IEEE article:

 

Of Modes and Men

Cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWIG desktop publishing—these are just a few of the user interface innovations pioneered by Larry Tesler

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/of-modes-and-men

[Bazza]

Continuing the NYT obit:

 

Quote

 

In addition to helping develop the Lisa and Macintosh, Mr. Tesler founded and ran Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, after which he led the design of the Newton hand-held computer, although that proved unsuccessful. The group also created much of the technology that would become the Wi-Fi wireless standard, and Mr. Tesler led an Apple joint venture with two other companies that created Acorn RISC Machine, a partnership intended to provide a microprocessor for the Newton.

 

Although Apple eventually sold off its holdings in that venture, it would come to dominate the market for the chips that power today’s smartphones. The chip architecture created by the partnership is today the most widely used microprocessor design in the world.

 

 

Led the design of the Apple Newton, the first handheld computer marketed as a "personal digital assistant" or PDA. A category that was dominated by the much cheaper Palm Pilot. 

 

And then there is ARM, the alliance between Apple and other companies about creating a CPU to power the Newton. IT is the chips based on ARM that are in every iPhone and iPad, and mostly every modern smartphone of the last 10 years or so. 

[Bazza]

In summary, from the IEEE article:

 

Quote

 

Like Woody Allen’s 1983 movie character, Zelig, who appears at every significant historical event of his era, has had a hand in major events making computer history during the past 30 years. When the first document-formatting software was developed at Stanford University in 1971, Tesler was coding it. When a secretary first cut and pasted some text on a computer screen at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973, Tesler was looking over her shoulder. When the first portable computer was turned on in an airport waiting area (and on an airplane), Tesler had his fingers on the keyboard. When Steve Jobs went to PARC in 1979 to see the legendary demo that is purported to have set the stage for a revolution in computing, Tesler had his hand on the mouse.

 

And when Apple Computer Inc.’s infamous Newton handheld computer failed spectacularly in the early 1990s, taking millions of dollars of investment and a few careers down with it, Tesler was there, too. Hey, nobody gets it right 100 percent of the time.

 

 

Quote

A number of words now commonly used to refer to computer attributes or actions were first used in the computing arena by Larry Tesler. Browser, Cut-and-paste, User-friendly, What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWIG)

 

[Cancer]

7 hours ago, Bazza said:

[...]

 

without WYSIWYG, there would likely have not been desktop publishing. 

 

Maybe, but it took Donald Knuth to make a system that was stable across operating systems (i.e., it looked the same on any platform), and display arbitrary text (including stuff that commercial publishers gouged customers mercilessly to make, specifically, mathematics), which were both essential for small independent publishing.

[Bazza]

Fairt enough. Just looked it up. It was TeX (like i thought) and was released before 1984. With my comment I was thinking about Aldus Pagemaker which was released for the Mac and kickstarted the whole desktop publishing industry. 

[Cancer]

For my master's thesis in 1981, I hired the typing out to a family business.  They were using small desktop computers, but I don't recall what software they ran.  For my PhD in 1986, I used stuff native to the BSD 4.3 (I think; might've been a late 4.2 version) Unix: troff, eqn, tbl, and I can't remember if there was a bibliographic utility in there as well, and typed it myself, using vi as the editor.  NOT a wysiwyg system, but the preview capacity worked quite well, and I didn't use a lot of paper in fussing with the typesetting, even for the equations.  (The department got a VAX 11/785 in '82 or '83, but rather than use VMS they loaded the BSD system on it; it had some foibles-- initially the mail spool files were wide open, so that you read and edit untraceably other people's emails before they were delivered, for instance-- but it served us well.)  One or two of the guys before me used Scribe, but that gave the user a greatly inferior level of control, and there were things it flat-out would not do.  Troff gave you full control but you had to put together your own macro packages in order to get the end product in full compliance with the university's thesis format rules.

 

Putting together troff macro packages rather resembled assembly language programming, but I had already been doing that for almost eight years so it didn't phase me at all.

[Bazza]

Cheers for posting. No wonder you know FORTRAN really well. 

[Cancer]

Fortran was a cause, not an effect, of what I mentioned above; my first computing course was in Winter 1976.  I started with assembly programming in Fall 1977, when I took a Physics lab techniques course in interfacing minicomputers to lab equipment.  Physicists, especially particle physicists, need the fastest possible data acquisition and analysis possible, and assembly is the way to get that.

[L. Marcus]

Haha, I was born in '75.

[Cancer]

So were you born knowing Fortran? 

[L. Marcus]

Eh. I've dabbled in whatever it was that made a Commodore 128 run.

[Cancer]

Metaphysics

[Bazza]

He got it wrong. It is epistemology. And his reasoning is flawed. By his reasoning we can't possess knowledge (which we do, as evidently shown by the cartoon), which makes his possessed knowledge, come from where exactly? 

 

edit: by his reasoning physics is also impossible. 

[Tech]

7-up vs RC Cola? Which do you pick?

[Bazza]

Neither. Too much sugar. 

[Bazza]

On 2/25/2020 at 8:34 AM, Cancer said:

So were you born knowing Fortran? 

 

Could be worse — born knowing COBOL. 

[Cancer]

58 minutes ago, Tech said:

7-up vs RC Cola? Which do you pick?

 

Usually RC, because I want a cola.  If for some reason I want a non-cola flavor, obviously 7-Up.  The latter doesn't happen that often; probably my most frequent carbonated drink is a more-or-less equal mix of orange juice and seltzer water, which gives me the carbonation I like while still being a fruit juice.

[Cancer]

1 hour ago, Bazza said:

He got it wrong. It is epistemology. And his reasoning is flawed. By his reasoning we can't possess knowledge (which we do, as evidently shown by the cartoon), which makes his possessed knowledge, come from where exactly? 

 

edit: by his reasoning physics is also impossible. 

 

Yup.  SMBC is a cartoon, and not really intended to be taken seriously.  I subsequently found this one which I find riotously funny also.