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Who invented Copy And Paste?

post #1 of 16
2/5/07 at 9:28pm
Thread Starter 
One of my mates beef's is thagt Apple uses the Apple Key for copy and pates, whereas every other OS uses the Ctrl key.

I suggested that maybe Apple invented copy and paste first, but he won't hear it. But out of curiosity, when did copy and paste appear and who did it?
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post #2 of 16
2/5/07 at 11:43pm
Quote:
Copy and paste in a modeless editor was invented by Larry Tesler at XEROX Parc for the Smalltalk-76 programming environment, in 1973-76. In Smalltalk, when you selected some text you had a large number of commands you could apply to the selection; 'again', 'copy', 'cut', 'paste', 'doit', 'compile', 'undo', 'cancel', 'align'. So it less likely that the command you would want to use 80% of the time would be 'copy'.

So no, not invented by Apple :-) I guess Apple, Commodore (Amiga) and Microsoft all extended this behaviour for all kinds of data throughout the OS, instead of only text.

The entire foundation of the GUI as we know it is invented by Xerox Parc. Xerox invented the laser printer but required a system to do "WYSIWYG" to get the maximum out of the printed. And so the idea was born to use the desktop metaphor. It even had some kind of protected memory system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
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post #3 of 16
2/6/07 at 4:25am
If your friend is merely angry that it is different, then that is kind of strange. Why shouldn't Apple use the extra key, rather than the ridiculous mess of Windows shortcuts. It is the "Command Key" for a reason. If he is upset about the placement, then that is understandable, but most people I know find that using the thumbs is easier than using pinkies to run shortcuts.
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post #4 of 16
2/6/07 at 3:09pm
Apple did make it standard shortcut from Mac OS 1.0 - Command C, X and V and chould see the content with show clipboard in the OS. Still the same in 10.4.9 , 23 years later.

You are right using the thumb is more natural that the pinky. A winner in the debut of Mac vs PC.

Windows you can't see the clipboard content with the standard OS, you can run a program to. And they copied the shortcut letters. Mac have a far better implementation of copy and paste between different application.
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post #5 of 16
2/6/07 at 7:52pm
From the wiki page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_paste

Quote:
The cut-and-paste paradigm was widely popularized by Apple in the Lisa (1981) and Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications. It was mapped to a key combination consisting of a special modifier key held down while typing the letters X (for cut), C (for copy), and V (for paste). These key combinations were later adopted by Microsoft in Windows.
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post #6 of 16
2/6/07 at 10:40pm
The Wiki says it all. "...Widely popularized by Apple..."; "...later adopted by Microsoft..."

Throw that in your friend's face.

I think MS first used the ctrl-c and ctrl-v combination in Win 3.1 but I'm not entirely certain. All I know is everybody was using Word Perfect and had to have a decoder card to tell you what the function keys (F1-F10) did. IIRC F1 was copy and F2 was paste.

Does anyone know if Xerox used keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste? I have an itching feeling that (key)-X, (key)-C and (key)-V were chosen by Apple.
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post #7 of 16
2/7/07 at 12:30am
Quote:
Originally Posted by tonton View Post

The Wiki says it all. "...Widely popularized by Apple..."; "...later adopted by Microsoft..."

Throw that in your friend's face.

I think MS first used the ctrl-c and ctrl-v combination in Win 3.1 but I'm not entirely certain. All I know is everybody was using Word Perfect and had to have a decoder card to tell you what the function keys (F1-F10) did. IIRC F1 was copy and F2 was paste.

Does anyone know if Xerox used keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste? I have an itching feeling that (key)-X, (key)-C and (key)-V were chosen by Apple.

Not exactly, remember that MS was a software developer for Apple long before it had anything resembling a GUI OS. That is where MS first used the "C" "X" "V" commands. Word and Excel were born on the Mac, so MS adopted it alright, and that wasn't the only thing they adopted from Apple.
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post #8 of 16
2/7/07 at 6:09am
Quote:
Originally Posted by iPeon View Post

... Word and Excel were born on the Mac, so MS adopted it alright, and that wasn't the only thing they adopted from Apple.

Word was born on MS-DOS. Excel was born on the Mac.
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post #9 of 16
2/7/07 at 9:49am
...again from Wiki... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_word

Quote:
Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Office Word, is Microsoft's flagship word processing software. It was first released in 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems.[1] Versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), the Apple Macintosh (1984), SCO UNIX, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows (1989).

So it appears that Word was first on Xenix - a UNIX system.
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post #10 of 16
2/7/07 at 8:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Me View Post

Word was born on MS-DOS. Excel was born on the Mac.

Technically yes, but you can't say that Word on MS-DOS was the same as Word for the Mac. MS-DOS was a command line interface. You can however say that Word on the PC evolved from the Mac, hence one can say that Word, as we know it today, was "born" on the Mac.

Interestingly, what command did Word in MS-DOS have for copy and paste?
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post #11 of 16
2/7/07 at 8:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by iPeon View Post

Technically yes, but you can't say that Word on MS-DOS was the same as Word for the Mac. ...

I'm guessing you didn't read Endymion's post?
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post #12 of 16
2/7/07 at 10:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Me View Post

I'm guessing you didn't read Endymion's post?

I did, and my statements stay unmodified. Perhaps you are missing my point. You can't say Word for DOS is the same, they are two different animals. Mater of fact, Word gained wide acceptance, only after it had been released on the Mac. The GUI program called Word that you use today had it's first introduction on the Mac. It was not DOS that made Word what Word is today, the Mac made what Word is today, so yes, Word was born on the Mac.

It's not that hard to see the difference between a character-based system such as DOS to a GUI such as Mac OS and Windows to see that, unless one has a hard time grasping concepts.
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post #13 of 16
2/8/07 at 6:10am
Quote:
Originally Posted by iPeon View Post

...

It's not that hard to see the difference between a character-based system such as DOS to a GUI such as Mac OS and Windows to see that, unless one has a hard time grasping concepts.

What in the world are you arguing about? You are carrying-on about something that is not in dispute. The issue at hand is about the origins of Word, not its popularity--an issue that has been resolved.
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post #14 of 16
2/8/07 at 6:35am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Me View Post

What in the world are you arguing about? You are carrying-on about something that is not in dispute. The issue at hand is about the origins of Word, not its popularity--an issue that has been resolved.

No, it hasn't been resolved. The Word on XENIX, DOS, etc. is pretty much a completely different app than the Word we have now. The GUI word on both Mac OS and Windows originates from the first Mac version.
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post #15 of 16
8/18/12 at 3:04pm

Maybe you guys should all watch this brilliant talk. The inventor of Copy-Paste is cited here too.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII&feature=player_embedded

 

Cheerz,

Stefio

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post #16 of 16
8/23/12 at 7:46am
Quote:
Originally Posted by iDunno View Post

One of my mates beef's is thagt Apple uses the Apple Key for copy and pates, whereas every other OS uses the Ctrl key.

I suggested that maybe Apple invented copy and paste first, but he won't hear it. But out of curiosity, when did copy and paste appear and who did it?

 

The purpose for using the command key is that control-letter combinations already have meaning for terminal interfaces. On windows it is difficult to CCP things in a terminal emulator for precisely this reason. Now that the mac has come full circle and includes a command line interface, it is great that apple was foresighted in not overloading the modifier key combinations. I curse this problem on windows every day. Seriously, it is a massive pain in the ass to not have standard CCP functtionality in terminal emulators.

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