A12| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
LARRY TESLER
1945 — 2020Computer Scientist
Stressed Ease of Use
A
s a high-school student in
the early 1960s, Larry Tesler
began teaching himself the
Fortran computer language and was
struck by what he saw as clumsy
syntax. He later recalled thinking
that everyone would have a com-
puter someday and “it needs to be
easier to do than this.”
At the time, computer designers
tended to focus on making the ma-
chines more powerful rather than
on turning them into tools for the
masses. Mr. Tesler, who died Feb. 16
at age 74, wanted computers to be
simple to operate even for people
with no computing experience. He
helped create cut-and-paste func-
tions, championed a mouse with
one button instead of four, and gave
Steve Jobs a tutorial that provided
some of the basic ideas behindAp-
pleInc.’s personal computers.
As an employee of Xerox Corp.’s
Palo Alto Research Center in the
1970s and later Apple, Mr. Tesler
influenced software and hardware
for decades. “I was born to do it
and feel very lucky to have been in
the right place at the right time,”
he told a publication of the Insti-
tute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers in 2005.
To test whether a program was
intuitive, he searched for people
with little or no computer experi-
ence. When Xerox hired a secretary
who had never gone beyond the
IBM Selectric typewriter, Mr. Tesler
sat her down for computer experi-
ments. “I grabbed her,” he said. “I
didn’t want her to get contami-
nated by some word processor that
we were using.”
He campaigned successfully
against the use of “modes” in soft-
ware. In early word-processing ap-
plications, for instance, people had
to use one mode for typing in text
and another for inserting material.
Switching from one mode to an-
other was confusing, said Mr. Tes-
ler, whose car had license plates
reading NO MODES.
Lawrence Gordon Tesler was
born in New York on April 24, 1945.
His father was an anesthesiologist.
In an oral history with the Com-
puter History Museum, Mr. Tesler
recalled that as a teenager he de-
vised a way to generate prime num-
bers. A math teacher told him he
had created an algorithm, something
that could be programmed into a
computer. That revelation sent him
scurrying to find a computer. An-
other student helped him get access
to one at Columbia University.A
fter graduating from high
school, he enrolled at Stan-
ford University, where, he re-
called later, “I kind of embedded
myself in the computer science mi-
lieu.” He soon was moonlighting as
a consultant, helping companies
with computer programming.
Like some other computer wiz-
ards in the late 1960s, he had one
foot in the counterculture. He
sprouted a beard, wore rimless
glasses and was treasurer of the
Midpeninsula Free University. Mr.
Tesler taught a course called “How
to End the IBM Monopoly” and
found it was infiltrated by employ-
ees of the computer company.BYJAMESR.HAGERTY In 1970, he moved to rural Ore-
gon with six friends and his daugh-
ter from an early, failed marriage.
Their plans included growing vege-
tables. “That was pretty cool,” he
said later, “but there was no income
up there.” He returned to Silicon
Valley and joined Xerox in 1973.
He and a colleague, Tim Mott,
created editing software called
Gypsy, used by a textbook-publish-
ing arm of Xerox. It pioneered cut-
and-paste and other functions that
eventually became standards.
In late 1979, Xerox assigned Mr.
Tesler to brief Mr. Jobs of Apple on
computer technology. Mr. Jobs
could barely contain his enthusi-
asm, according to the 2011 biogra-
phy of the Apple founder by Walter
Isaacson. “He was hopping around
so much I don’t know how he actu-
ally saw most of the demo,” Mr.
Tesler recalled, “but he did, be-
cause he kept asking questions.”
Mr. Tesler joined Apple in 1980.
Two of the major projects he
worked on—the Lisa personal com-
puter in the early 1980s and the
Newton hand-held computer a de-
cade later—were commercial flops
that provided ideas for more suc-
cessful products. He served for a
time as Apple’s chief scientist.
After leaving Apple, he helped set
up Stagecast Software Inc., a maker
of software allowing children to cre-
ate games, in the late 1990s. That
business never took off. Mr. Tesler
left for Amazon.com Inc., where he
worked on refining user experience,
and later worked for Yahoo! Inc.
His survivors include his wife,
Colleen Barton, a daughter and two
brothers.
“I wasn’t on a career ladder,” he
said in the oral history. “I was on
more of a career seesaw. Didn’t
bother me. Come up with a new
thing, grow it big, give it to some-
body else, start over with a new
thing.”
Read a collection of in-depth
profiles atWSJ.com/Obituariesresearch findings and featuring
recipes created by one of her
daughters, Laura Morris. The book
argues that young and middle-
aged adults should change their
diets to help keep their brains
healthy in old age.
Exercise, learning new skills
and having an active social life
also promote brain health, Dr.
Morris said.
Dr. Morris earned a master’s
degree in sociology at the Univer-
sity of Iowa and worked with a
team studying the health of old
people in rural areas. A job offer
lured her to Harvard University,
where she eventually earned a
doctor of science degree in epide-
miology while raising three chil-
dren.
—James R. HagertyMARTHA CLARE MORRIS
1955 — 2020Researcher Linked Diet
To Risk of Dementia
M
artha Clare Morris, direc-
tor of Rush University’s
Institute for Healthy Ag-
ing, conducted studies suggesting
that a healthier diet reduces the
risks of Alzheimer’s disease and
other forms of dementia.
Dr. Morris, who died of esopha-
geal cancer on Feb. 15 at the age
of 64, also devised what she
called the MIND diet. It draws on
the Mediterranean diet and the
DASH diet, which is intended to
help control high blood pressure.
Among other things, the MIND
diet calls for berries, leafy green
vegetables, seafood, whole grains,
beans, nuts, olive oil and wine, in
moderation. Dr. Morris singled out
blueberries as particularly helpful.
In 2017, she published a book,
“Diet for the Mind,” outlining herKATHERINE JOHNSON
1918 — 2020Human Computer
Found Niche at NASA
S
he was a human computer
and the invisible woman of
the space race. Katherine
Johnson’s work as a mathemati-
cian at the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration for 33
years was vital but unknown to
the public until decades later.
Her story finally reached a
wide audience in “Hidden Fig-
ures,” a 2016 movie based on a
book by Margot Lee Shetterly.
After working as a school-
teacher and giving birth to three
daughters, she joined a team that
made life-or-death calculations
for the Mercury, Apollo and Shut-
tle space missions. Before John
Glenn was shot into space in
1962, she verified the orbital-tra-
jectory math that a computer had
generated for his flight, accordingto Ms. Shetterly’s book.
An African-American woman,
she thrived in a world that was
predominantly white and male.
When she arrived in 1953 at the
agency that later became NASA,
signs still designated certain bath-
rooms as being for colored people.
Ms. Johnson, who died Monday
at age 101, often said she was too
busy to worry about racial dis-
crimination. She cited something
her father told her when she was
a girl: “You are as good as any-
body...but you’re no better.”
Ms. Johnson, who worked at
the Langley Research Center in
Hampton, Va., retired from NASA
in 1986. She was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in
2015.
—James R. HagertyOBITUARIES
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