THE gravestone of the inventor of copy-and-paste contains unwanted characters including ‘Ā’ and ‘§’ because of formatting errors, it has emerged.
The headstone for Larry Tesler, the computer scientist who created cut, paste and copy while working at Apple in the 1980s, is thought to contain the rogue symbols because formatting was carried over from a Word document.
Mourner Joseph Turner said: “I don’t know what went wrong. It looked fine on the screen.
“But we should have run it through Notepad or something to standardise the formatting before it went to the memorial masons, because they’ve obviously printed it out then done it from that and frankly there’s a few errors.
“There’s paragraph indents in front of his name and his dates, the weird A-with-a-line after his name where we must have left a stray space, and that was meant to be a long dash between 1945 and 2020. Not two underscores separated by a full stop.
“Ah well. People just scan these things anyway. Sure nobody’ll notice.”
