Cut, Copy, and Paste - History

History

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 as late as the 1970s. 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.

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 (AKA, "the clipboard") for later retrieval/placement.

Although the mechanism was already in widespread use in early line and character editors, Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) popularized "cut and paste" in the context of computer-based text-editing while working at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1974–1975.

Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut-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:

• Z to undo
• X to cut
• C to copy
• V to paste

Control-V was first used for paste in the QED editor.

CUA (for OS/2) also uses combinations of the Insert, Del, Shift and Control keys. Early versions of Windows used the IBM standard. Microsoft later adopted the Apple style key-combinations with the introduction of Windows, 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 in most GUI text editors, word processors, and file system browsers.