Larry Tesler: A Personal History of Modeless Text Editing and Cut/Copy-Paste (2012)
dl.acm.orgI love how many interviews Larry Tesler did (he passed away in 2020), he was so influential and it's interesting to see what that looks like from the inside.
Gypsy (that first modeless editor) recently turned 50 years old and I wrote about it here largely from those first-hand accounts: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-gypsy-document-editor-cele...
And it's not mentioned in this ACM interview but rather this one with the Computer History Museum https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... that implementing a modeless editor was easier too, since you could use a simple case-switch instead of having a bunch of explicit modules for each mode.
He was so passionate about no modes he had a personal number plate for his car that was “NO MODES”
"NOMODES" (without the space): https://itsthedatastupid.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/no-modes/
Direct to PDF, https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2212877.2212896
This man doesn't get enough credit and Steve Jobs gets way too much.
So much of what the Mac was came from what Tesler built into the Lisa project based on his personal convictions on what computing could be.
Jobs got a reputation for "taste" but a lot of the origins of what that looked like in practice were Tesler (and others, obviously) driven.
Jobs can be credited more for bringing all these people - talented & tasteful as they were - together through his mix of passion, charisma and "reality distortion field", IMHO, than making all the tasteful decisions himself.
He was aware of that: in one video, he pointed out that once he managed to hire the top 1-2 people, the other people will come because they'd want to work with the best.
Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project because he was disruptive. Then proceeded to start the Mac project as competition and steal Lisa's UI ideas (and some of its talent).
Honestly, after he got pushed out of Apple he learned some lessons, but I don't think the actual history there reflects what you're saying.
I agree with this, but it's also true that Tesler was a difficult, argumentative blocker and dinosaur at Yahoo! in the mid-2000s. The upper management there blew such massive opportunities, over and over and over again.
What was he working on at Yahoo!? Sounds like you might have some interesting stories.
Thanks for the link!
I have come to modal editors after decades of modeless, I enjoy them - but respect, understand, and appreciate Tesler's efforts, and I always enjoy reading about them.
I misread this as terry lesler and was excited that HN was talking about scott the woz