The man responsible for cut/copy/paste (and making countless writers' lives easier) has died.

It’s hard to imagine how people wrote novels (or blog posts) before the advent of the cut and paste function. (Don’t @ me, Luddites.) Cut/paste is a gift to anyone who doesn’t necessarily want to kill every darling, but would prefer to move a few of them around. And for that gift, we can thank computer scientist Larry Tesler, who died Monday at 74.

Tesler worked on cut, copy, and paste technologies at both Xerox and Apple, paving the way for writers everywhere to see how this conversation looks about 50 pages later in the manuscript, after we’ve already learned about the amulet.

Among those affected by the news is Book Marks editor Dan Sheehan, who only recently learned about Command+C.

[via Gizmodo]