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American computer scientist (1945–2020)

Lawrence Gordon Tesler (April 24, 1945 – February 16, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!. While at PARC, Tesler's work included Smalltalk, the first dynamic object oriented programming language, and Gypsy, the first word processor with a graphical user interface (GUI) for the Xerox Alto. During this, along with colleague Tim Mott, Tesler developed the idea of copy and paste functionality and the idea of modeless software. While at Apple, Tesler worked on the Apple Lisa and the Apple Newton, and helped to develop Object Pascal and its use in application programming toolkits including MacApp.

Tesler was born on April 24, 1945, in the Bronx in New York City, to Jewish parents Isidore, an anesthesiologist, and Muriel At Stanford, he had spent time as a student programmer for Joshua Lederberg on the LINC platform,

During college and afterward, Tesler did some programming jobs on the side, and after graduation, worked as a consultant offering his programming services in the area. As he was one of only a few computer programmers listed in the Palo Alto phone directory he received a good deal of work. However, a regional recession caused this consulting work to dry up. Tesler says that he was misquoted, his actual statement being "Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet." At this time, Tesler's marriage to his college girlfriend had ended in divorce. He took his daughter and moved to Oregon with a number of Vietnam War veterans who were returning there to build homes. There was little computing technology in this area and he could not get a job with the local bank, the only firm nearby with a computer system. Tesler also was part of a team with Adele Goldberg and Douglas Fairbairn that worked on the Xerox NoteTaker, a portable computer system Alan Kay had envisioned. Tesler, then a novice to hardware programming and design, worked with Fairbairn on the design, which included the first functioning Ethernet protocol written in software rather than on hardware.

Tesler was one of several Xerox PARC employees who left the company in 1980 to join Apple Computer following Jobs's visits. Tesler started at Apple in July 1980 supporting the development of the Apple Lisa, and worked for them until 1997, holding various positions, including Vice President of AppleNet, the division within Apple working on Internet technologies (not to be confused with AppleNet, the never shipped network for the Lisa), Vice President of the Advanced Technology Group, and Chief Scientist. Part of Tesler's work with the Lisa was to develop object oriented programming extensions to the Pascal programming language allowing easier manipulation of the GUI. Tesler worked with Pascal's creator, Niklaus Wirth, to develop Object Pascal in 1985 which was used to create the Lisa Toolkit. When Apple moved onto the Macintosh platform, the same concepts were brought forward to create MacApp, a similar Object Pascal based class library for the Macintosh's GUI functions released in 1985. However, Tesler claimed some decisions related to the Newton's release, such as deciding against an Apple developed handwriting recognition software, over a third party which slowed down the device, were estimated to have cost Apple millions of dollars. Tesler decided to leave Apple in 1997. One of his last acts was to close the Advanced Technology Group as Apple was struggling too much financially to support such a research program at that time.

One of the last programs that Tesler oversaw at Apple was a programming language aimed for use by schoolchildren, named Cocoa (unrelated to the Cocoa application programming interface later released by Apple). With Apple's permission, Tesler spun out and cofounded Stagecast Software in Palo Alto in 1997, where his small team further developed Stagecast Creator, a programming environment aimed for educational uses that had been under development at Apple. Stagecast Creator was released in 1999, just at the time that the education market had turned financially downhill, and sales of the program were not sufficient to keep the company in business. Tesler dismissed most of the employees in mid 2000, and then left, leaving two employees to continue the company. After three years, he found that Yahoo! had too many competing product lines and a lack of focus, and left in 2008. before establishing himself as an independent consultant in December 2009 to help Silicon Valley companies with designing their user interfaces and experiences. Along with others, he had also been using the phrase "Don't Mode Me In" for years, as a rallying cry to eliminate or reduce modes usage. His personal website was located at "nomodes. com" (maintained by his family now for historical reference), and on Twitter had used the handle "@nomodes". Tesler died in Portola Valley, California, on February 16, 2020, at the age of 74.