Long ago, when I was a lawyer for a big government agency and I had to write briefs in scores or even hundreds of similar cases, I often relied on an old friend.
Copy and paste. Control-C and Control-V. (Maybe Command–C and Command-V if you’re on a Mac, as I am now but wasn’t then.)
Basically, I used big chunks of the same documents, the same arguments, the same filings—over and over and over. A few facts would be different; occasionally someone would raise a new issue.
But otherwise, it was pretty much Groundhog Day. My work friends and I shared our briefs with each other, too.
At times, it seemed the whole court system would be more efficient if we could just file one brief, and then refer various judges around the country to it, in case after case after case.
That wasn’t going to happen. Too many people’s livelihoods depended on the duplication. But, it turns out that there’s a single individual who deserves my thanks for making my life a bit more manageable back then.
The man who invented it
His name: Larry Tessler. This is the guy who came up with the idea of “cut, copy, and paste” in word processing in the first place.
Tessler worked for Xerox PARC in the late 1970s, where two experiences stand out:
His aforementioned development of “cut, copy and paste,” which came about while he was working on an early, 1970s word processing program called Gypsy. (More details on this from Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo.)
His encounter with Steve Jobs, during the latter’s now-legendary tour of the Xerox PARC labs in 1979. This is when Jobs supposedly first was introduced to things Xerox was working on, like (a) graphical interfaces and (b) the mouse, that wound up in Apple products a few years later.
Not long after that visit, Tessler left Xerox and headed to the much-smaller Apple. As Luke Dormehl of Cult of Mac recalled him saying years later:
“It’s funny because Apple was really the trigger for me wanting to leave Xerox, but I’d never seriously considered it as a career option.
Even though I had been pretty impressed by the people who attended the PARC demo, I still thought of them as primarily being a hobbyist computer company.”
Tessler was at Apple from 1980 to 1997, working mainly on two products that are now known more for being groundbreaking than for being successful themselves: the Newton and the Lisa.
Like they say, “pioneers get slaughtered; settlers prosper.”
Typical Apple
Today, Dormehl holds up Tessler as having been typical among the fairly early recruits at Apple: equal parts tech visionary and bearded hippie.
He’d studied computer science at Stanford before working at Xerox. But in between, he’d also helped to found a commune in Oregon.
As you might gather from my use of the past tense in this newsletter, Tessler passed away a few years ago, at age 74.
We take things like “copy and paste” for granted. Heck, I’ve probably used it 10 times while writing today’s newsletter.
But, I once joined a digital media startup where we were dead-set on creating the world’s best proprietary content management system—basically, the software that writers use in order to write and publish their articles.
Our lead developer did a fantastic job. But can you guess what turned out to be the second-most-difficult feature to build from scratch?
Sure enough: Cut, copy and paste.
(Hardest: “Undo,” or “Control-Z,” because building this feature requires taking a virtual snapshot of every change in every document, every few milliseconds.)
Anyway, rest in peace Mr. Tessler. If only we could copy you so easily.
Other things worth knowing …
NBC News — The U.S. military is considering officially renaming the war with Iran from “Operation Epic Fury” to “Operation Sledgehammer” if the current ceasefire collapses and President Donald Trump decides to re-start major combat operations, according to two U.S. officials. The intent apparently is to allow Trump to argue that it restarts the 60-day clock that requires congressional authorization for war.
NPR — As Trump goes to China, what do Americans say about tariffs, Iran and world standing?
The Hill — FBI Director Kash Patel said he would commit to taking a test about his alcohol use after a testy exchange with Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in which each traded accusations with the other. Van Hollen pointed to a story in The Atlantic, which Patel has said is false, to raise questions about the FBI director’s drinking. “When your private actions make it impossible for you to perform your public duties, we have a big problem,” Van Hollen said to Patel during the hearing.
AP News — Two South Florida police officers claim Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s recent action thriller “The Rip” used too many real-life details in its fictionalized narrative, causing harm to the officers’ personal and professional reputations, according to a defamation lawsuit. Parts of the movie were inspired by a real 2016 case, where police found over $21 million linked to a suspected marijuana trafficker in a Miami Lakes home.
Politico — Former President Joe Biden intends to intervene in litigation to block the Trump administration’s effort to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter who worked with Biden on his memoirs, the Justice Department indicated in new court papers.
CBS News — A Texas couple whose son died of an overdose in 2025 after using OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool to get information about drugs sued the technology company on Tuesday, blaming the AI platform for his death.
The New York Times — Hacky sacks are back: Teenagers are booting the game out of the 1990s. “It’s kind of bringing everybody together,” one said.
Thanks for reading. Today’s was a low power mode edition, and if you already know that, I love you. See you in the comments.
. . . and before copy, cut and paste, there was cut and tape! In the early 2000s I was required to review a document that was so poorly written that I went back the pre-word processing method of cut and tape. The employee that drafted the report, just could not grasp how to move stuff around in a document.
I cut the paragraphs and sometimes sentences apart so that the connected topics could be grouped in like content paragraphs and then taped them back together reorganized into a logical flow of information below applicable and appropriately named sections in the report body. Then I asked the employee to go back and reconstruct the report. The employees following reports had much better presentation.
Yes, I am old enough that I learned to type and make corrections on a manual typewriter with a monospaced fonts, hyphenated words, and use of carbon paper - and was required to type 30 wpm with no errors in order to get a C for the class. You get exceptionally good at reworking text to keep the content on a single page and avoid hyphenation or a dangling last few words of a paragraph on the following page.
Love cut, copy, paste features. Use them all the time on Google Translate when I have to have a more involved conversation beyond my basic understanding of Spanish.