Alto System Project: Larry Tesler demonstration of Gypsy

Larry Tesler demonstrates Gypsy, an early modeless text editor featuring one of the first implementations of cut and paste, on a restored Xerox Alto.

[Recorded on 2017-09-20] This interpretive production was created from archival footage of Larry Tesler operating the program “Gypsy” on the Computer History Museum’s restored Xerox Alto computer at the Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on September 20th, 2017. Gypsy is a modeless text editor and document preparation program created by Larry Tesler and Tim Mott in the mid-1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for the Lexington, Massachusetts-based Ginn and Company, a Xerox subsidiary and textbook publisher. In Gypsy, Tesler and Mott made one of the earliest implementations of the “Cut and Paste” idiom for text editing, which has become ubiquitous in computing. This video captures Larry Tesler’s demonstration of cut and paste in Gypsy. Catalog number: 102738551 Lot number: X8330.2018