The term "
cut and paste" comes from the traditional practice in manuscript-editings whereby people would literally cut paragraphs from a page with
scissors and physically
paste them onto another page. This practice remained standard into the 1980s. Stationery stores formerly sold "editing scissors" with blades long enough to cut an 8½"-wide page. The advent of
photocopiers made the practice easier and more flexible.
The act of copying/transferring text from one part of a computer-based document ("
buffer") to a different location within the same or different computer-based document was a part of the earliest on-line computer editors. As soon as computer data entry moved from punch-cards to online files (in the mid/late 1960s) there were "commands" for accomplishing this operation. This mechanism was often used to transfer frequently-used commands or text snippets from additional buffers into the document, as was the case with the
QED editor.
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Early methods
The earliest editors, since they were designed for "hard-copy" terminals, provided
keyboard commands to delineate contiguous regions of text, remove such regions, or move them to some other location in the file. Since moving a region of text required first removing it from its initial location and then inserting it into its new location various schemes had to be invented to allow for this multi-step process to be specified by the user.
Often this was done by the provision of a 'move' command, but some text editors required that the text be first put into some temporary location for later retrieval/placement. In 1983, the
Apple Lisa became the first text editing system to call that temporary location "the clipboard".
Earlier control schemes such as
NLS used a
verb-object command structure, where the command name was provided first and the object to be copied or moved was second. The inversion from
verb-object to
object-verb on which copy and paste are based, where the user selects the object to be operated before initiating the operation, was an innovation crucial for the success of the desktop metaphor as it allowed copy and move operations based on
direct manipulation.
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Popularization
Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—
Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at
Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.
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Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut/copy-and-paste paradigm through the
Lisa (1983) and
Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications. Apple mapped the functionalities to key combinations consisting of the
Command key (a special
modifier key) held down while typing the letters X (for cut), C (for copy), and V (for paste), choosing a handful of
keyboard sequences to control basic editing operations. The keys involved all cluster together at the left end of the bottom row of the standard
QWERTY keyboard, and each key is combined with a special
modifier key to perform the desired operation:
The
IBM Common User Access (CUA) standard also uses combinations of the
Insert,
Del,
Shift and
Control keys. Early versions of
Windows[
dubious – discuss] used the IBM standard.
Microsoft later also adopted the Apple style key combinations with the introduction of
Windows[
dubious – discuss], choosing the
control key as their
modifier key which had previously been reserved for sending
control characters.
Similar patterns of key combinations, later borrowed by others, remain widely available today
[update] in most GUI text editors, word processors, and file system browsers.
The informal term 'copypasta' is text that has been copied and pasted, often repeatedly and indiscriminately such as by spammers or people obsessively promoting a cause.
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