Copy Paste

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 anotherpage. 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 practiceeasier 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 documentwas 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.[1]

The earliest editors, sincethey 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 aregion 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 bythe 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 laterretrieval/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-basedtext-editing while working at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1974–1975.[2]

Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa...