I 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.<p>Gypsy (that first modeless editor) recently turned 50 years old and I wrote about it here largely from those first-hand accounts: <a href="https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-gypsy-document-editor-celebrating-50-years" rel="nofollow">https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-gypsy-document-editor-cele...</a><p>And it's not mentioned in this ACM interview but rather this one with the Computer History Museum <a href="https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2014/08/102746675-05-01-acc.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...</a> 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.
Direct to PDF, <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2212877.2212896" rel="nofollow">https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2212877.2212896</a>
Thanks for the link!<p>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.
This man doesn't get enough credit and Steve Jobs gets way too much.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.