Larry Tessler, the computer scientist behind Apple Inc. in the 80s and 90s, died Monday at age 74, according to Apple Insider.

Tessler began his career as a programmer and Stanford University AI researcher in the 60s before joining Xerox in 1973. One of his inventions from his Xerox days is so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget that someone else invented it.

With Tim Mott at Xerox, Tessler created the cut, copy, and paste commands we use every day. He did not invent the basic idea of moving digital text from one place to another, but he did create a specific method and naming convention that will live on for posterity.

In 1980, Tessler joined Apple. He first contributed to Apple Lisa and its graphical user interface, which included advances on his earlier user interface and led to the popularization of his copy and paste commands. 1986 he became Apple's Vice President of Advanced Technology and was promoted to vice president and chief scientist in 1993.

Tessler clearly contributed far more than Ctrl-C (or Command-C in Apple parlance) during his career. He was a key member of Apple's founding team, overseeing R&D and contributing to Macintosh, HyperCard, MacApp, QuickTime, AppleScript, etc. [After leaving Apple in 1997, he co-founded the education company Stagecast Software and worked for Amazon, Yahoo, and other technology companies before becoming a consultant in 2009. [His motto for human-computer interaction was "no mode," meaning that user input should have a consistent effect and should not be bound to different modes of operation, e.g., entering text into a word processing document versus entering commands into a word processor The first was.

For a more in-depth look at Tessler's life, we recommend writer Luke Dormer's concise account posted today at Cult of Mac.