However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).
Most Alto users didn't even use theirs until MazeWar came along. Then tech support was flooded with bad keysets that people wanted to start using.
Also, I’ve seen some terrible move UI. It may seem cool to have a big floating blob of text follow the curser but that doesn’t work well when you want to move multiple pages or across multiple pages.
Yes, that's the tradeoff; you'd have to delete that separately. This would be quite close the X11 primary selection and middle-click paste. I think that works reasonably well on its own, but trying to provide both models as X11 does is a mess.
There’s a reason copy usually gets the C shortcuts I think.
In Jonny Ives’ brilliance, the magnified view was done away with for several iOS versions.
This man was Karl Pilkington of technology.
that's why "non-obvious" is so contentious in patent examinations. How do you KNOW it was obvious at the time?
Which is was. A few hundred years ago. Cut-and-paste began as a manual process. Arranging material for printed often involved very literal cutting and pasting of text and images. Entire trades (typesetters) were dedicated to the task. A more accurate description of Tesler's contribution was that he was the first to implement the concept in the digital realm. The person who "invented" the delete key did not invent the concept of deleting a character.
Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...
Of course bread has been served sliced for centuries before
e.g. the following things were all invented:
- that a human dwelling has space between adjacent dwellings and/or eventually streets (straight streets came even later)
- punctuation and spaces between words (looking at you Ancient Greek)
- what word to use when answering the phone ("ahoy hoy" was one proposed option)
It really is true what Steve Jobs said (apropos given Larry Tesler worked at Apple):
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.|
That said, I'm pretty sure the double click came about because certain operations were costly. There is no particular reason why would couldn't use a single click to launch and application or load a document, except an accidental click would force the user to wait for the process to complete (and it could take an unreasonably long period of time on older systems). Assigning that function to a secondary button would potentially make the problem worse since the user would have to keep the functions straight while learning the system, while accidentally clicking the wrong button would be more frequent than accidentally clicking a button.
I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then!
The world has a real problem with people arguing what they know is best without any basis in reality. Even if there is a clear reason one choice is better, most arguments for the better choice end up being because they know it better not the clear reasons it is better (see most metric/imperial arguments)
The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.
The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide:
8<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Shortcuts
The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents. Because you use these commands so frequently, the Office System includes a simple shortcut for performing these tasks: clicking the mouse button twice.
To tear off a sheet of stationery, click twice rapidly on the stationery pad icon.
To open an icon into a window, click twice rapidly on the icon.
To close an open window, click twice rapidly on the window's title bar icon.
Clicking twice to close a window can either set aside the object or save and put away the object, depending on where the object's shadows are. If there is a shadow on the desktop, clicking twice causes the object to be set aside. If the only shadow is in a folder or on a disk, clicking twice summons a dialog box, which asks you whether you want the object set aside or put away.
8<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
You are very unlikely to discover the double click by accident.
When it was three, every Alto program had its own set of conventions for them. There was no way that could have been unified for a multi-purpose computer.
Even Xerox tried to reduce it to one button for the Star (their first commercial GUI computer), but from their own published account they couldn’t find a way and the Star shipped with a 2-button mouse.
Remember, at the time most people targeted by Apple (or other computer manufacturers) had never used a computer, and the people who did use a computer never used a mouse! (Except for the PARC researchers and some other researchers, so maybe 2000 people worldwide)
It’s people coming from Xerox to Apple who were the most interested in having a one button mouse! They knew the 3-button mouse would confuse users and was entirely unnecessary for most users (as it is today, the secondary click being reduced to just a convenient shortcut, nothing more)
A previous comment about the 2-button Star and how these buttons were actually used: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750283
I think the way the article lays out the invention shows that it was a good idea at the time. Apple sticking to a single button mouse was a bad idea. But it wasn't like Tesler saw three buttons and said "If I remove two, I'm a genius".
I don't know what you do with your third button, but I have never used it. It's not a core interaction in any interface I've seen. On my windows machine it does all sorts of unexpected things from starting a scroll mode, dragging items (very rarely) to closing tabs, to nothing on most things. It's not useful. Now the back and forth buttons are super handy, but I wouldn't say they are essential to a mouse.
Today of course Apple uses trackpads with "zero" buttons (though the trackpad is clickable in various ways) and a lot of non-obvious (though generally well-designed) gestures like two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom/rotate, etc.
> Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.
It’s slow regardless of my internet connection
surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.
Good luck trying to find a thunderbolt cable unless you already know they categorize it as a "Mac Accessory - Charging Essentials". Lots of big carousels showing a sum total of 3 items at a time, and you better know the what a thunderbolt cable looks like, and don't mistake it for "merely" a usb3 charging cable. Or the 0.5m vs 1m.
Or using a mac - window management issues aside (it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....) - the "settings" app is a joke. A huge list of sections on the left, grouped seemingly arbitrarily, with a "Search" that only really works is you already know the exact wording of the option you're looking for. But hey, it's got fancy icons, so I guess that's nice.
This is all a bit tongue in cheek - using a mac to write this. All UX is "bad" in different ways IMHO. "Objectively best" UX is a pipe dream.
Isn't this normal on Windows too? The few times I have to use it, it seems I'm always doing something where some sub-window will pop up that I need to use or read, but the stupid thing is comically small, but needs to be scrolled (because there's too much content inside it for its size), but I'm forbidden from expanding the window size the way you can with normal windows.
This never happens to me in KDE: if a window is too small by default (which sometimes happens), I can always expand it.
The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you can from existing users while potential new ones trickle away to sites that are simply better, easier to navigate and just less likely to sell you falsely packaged shit.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t... (I'm not sure why ebay isn't in this chart?)
[1] https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...
Also, Amazon's retail empire is very much buttressed by its speedy delivery service, and thus warehouses and the truck fleet. A much better web site sometimes cannot compete with next-day delivery. (And sometimes can, of course!)
Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor.
Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font.
Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.
> describe things on an abstract level
That's exactly what ordinary users do NOT want.
You're mistaking Microsoft's specific implementation fumbles with an interaction mode that helps billions of people every day. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are plenty of good WYSIWYG implementations out there.
You can have print preview if you want to preview the page layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing the text as it is being typed, anyways.
(I don't know why the spelling is different)
So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?
Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm is?
That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible with most modern computers; this can be done independently of WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to display it on the computer before you print it on paper.
Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview; if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold, italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.
Case in point: my book was edited in Vellum, and it can generate PDF and EPUB. The PDF had a widow (one line at the top of the last page of the chapter), and Vellum just omitted that one-line page. To the reader it seemed like a typo (which it was, in a sense).
I "fixed" it by removing a few words up above it, so everything fit on the last full page. But it was only that I knew about widow/orphan control that I could figure that out. Just imagine how much trouble it would be to make things perfectly WYSIWYG on every printer and every type of document.
"Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe his accomplishments.
> In 1969 Tesler volunteered to help create a catalog for the Bay Area’s Mid-Peninsula Free University. He and Jim Warren, founder of the West Coast Computer Faire, did the paste-up for that catalog. Around the same time, Tesler saw a demo of a computer command that allowed you to bring back something that you had deleted. The command was called “Escape P Semicolon” (or something similarly arcane). Several years later, when Tesler was at Xerox PARC writing a white paper about the future of computing, he drew on the memory of those two experiences to predict that you would be able to “cut and paste” within computer documents.
Just to be clear that I'm not intending to disrespect his work, just arguing the semantic meaning of "invention" with respect to this. His obsession with mode-less user interfaces and user-facing simplicity is far more significant a contribution to society in general (and ironically, cut-and-paste is almost the antithesis of his main philosophy as the once-cut data becomes hidden state - it'd be a better metaphor to highlight the data and physically move it around the document).
It's not completely hidden - you can view it using "Show Clipboard"
In principle this is false with a Plan9-like model of mouse chording. Holding left click over a selection and tapping middle click is a reasonable solution.
yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!
I think there is some kind of psychological thing driving this. Like subconsciously, I came to the conclusion many years ago that "real programmers" use vim or Emacs, and then consciously decided that the default keybindings for Emacs were slightly worse.
So for decades I have been trying to learn just enough vim to get by. But practically every day I miss my PC keys for things like selecting text.
At least three times I have got my keybindings the way I wanted and then after a new install or something just decided to deal with the outdated way that vim does it.
You have to realize the context that vim was invented. There was no WYSIWYG. People were used to things like 'ed' where everything was a command. Just being able to stay in a mode and move around freely on the screen was a big deal. The terminal hardware didn't even have a way to hold a key combination.
The one button mouse was significantly underrated. Using the keyboard keys as modifier keys to the mouse was ergonomically great, and anybody who complains about the mouse seems to never really understand how that system worked.
It answers the question “why does this have to be so complicated?”, which I have found to be useful in countless numbers of UI discussions.
“We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an uncomplicated way.”
Well, it can’t be less complicated than any one of those things then.
https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable...
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_r...>
There's also Larry Wall's "Waterbed Theory", effectively that complexity cannot be squashed down: it will out. Though I suspect this post-dates Tesler.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298
See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave Apple an inside line/competitive advantage with ARM that we’re still seeing today, it also meant that Apple owned ARM stock—and could sell it. When the company was near its nadir in the late 1990s, it nursed itself back to health by selling shares of ARM.
So even Tesler’s biggest failure was a stroke of genius.
Still a great user interface and the handwriting recognition still works great (though it is a little slow).
Very much ahead of it's time, the early palm era was such a massive backslide (aside from size and price).
Better -
https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men
He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the 70's.
BBC wrongly somewhat implies Cut/Paste was 80s, in the post computing invention era.
I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented" the term "desktop", or "folder".
[0]https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-Whatcha-...
Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published).
> “And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’”
Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did.
> As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ].
The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M. (he IS a little stiff in this)
And that stake was quite possibly crucial in helping Apple survive.
> Plus it's on record that Apple made a total of $1.1 billion out of selling those shares, which represented a profit of 366 times its original investment. That money helped Apple survive, and Jobs decision to cut the Newton — with its ARM processor — was also part of the surgery needed to keep Apple alive.[1]
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...
Larry Tesler Has Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 - Feb 2020 (149 comments)
If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then inserting anything more you type. And so on.
Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.
A CPA??
Im glad to see that counselors have always been terrible?
I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough of his!)
... For anyone else who didn't want to look it up.
Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com) 1346 points on Feb 19, 2020 | 155 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282
Edit: Original URL updated from BBC obit to IEEE post so this is a bit of a non sequitur now.
