[ih] cut and paste

[John Shoch]

The text editor history is fun, but I thought I might return to Dave C.'s
initial question:  the origin of "cut and paste" -- or perhaps more
narrowly "cut and paste as we know it today."



--This is a phrase which goes back centuries, in the world of printing.

A quick search of the OED finds a usage from 1772:



*"1772. *This was only cutting and pasting, as I used to call it: For when
I met with any passages in preceding authors that suited my present
purpose, without ceremony I cut the books to pieces, and, by adding a
connecting sentence or two of my own, tacked the copy together,..and sent
it to the press."

*Younger Brother vol. II. 166*

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cut_v?tab=meaning_and_use



--Clearly, all the early computer text editors had the ability to do the
equivalent function of a cut and paste, under various names and/or command
sequences.


--But these early character- and line-oriented editors usually depended on
you knowing where you were in a file, or in a line of text.



--I presume it was NLS, at SRI, which introduced the first mouse-based
selection of a 2D block of text.  From the "NLS User Training Guide":

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2021/06/102734155-05-01-acc.pdf

"...moving or copying any portion of text from one file to another
(automating the traditional cut and paste technique)...."

But recall that NLS included both a Display NLS (DNLS), with a complicated
Command/Operand structure, and a Terminal NLS (TNLS) that was much more
complex.



--Ca. 1972 at Parc Bill Duvall built an NLS-style editor (CGEDIT), running
on a Nova 800 with a hardware character generator.  It supported
proportionally spaced fonts, and the ability to select arbitrary words,
lines, or "TEXT (Bug-left [Bug-right])".  Commands were called Insert,
Replace/Delete, and Move.



--In a 12/23/1973 memo Larry Tesler was working to simplify text editing
for secretarial users:

"The results suggest certain modifications to the CGEDIT-type user
interface...."

"The sophisticated display editing systems designed by computerists for
computerists often put off laymen who consider them complicated."

"The intuitive use of a keyset is as a set of control keys (not as the
alphabet in binary)."

"The command-first (prefix) command language of NLS and CGEDIT is awkward
and unintuitive.... A command-last (postfix) language would be better...."



--This led to Gypsy:  a system commissioned by Ginn, a publishing company
then owned by Xerox, to be used by their book editors.  Built on a
foundation from Bravo, It embodied Larry's belief in a "modeless editing"
system.  To simplify usage the keyset was not used as a chord-keyset, but
as 5 individual function keys;  adopting terminology from the printing
industry, two of them were labelled Cut and Paste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/GypsyEvaluation_Sep76.pdf

You can see some of this in Larry's demo on this page, at around 11:00 min.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/19/21144516/larry-tesler-cut-copy-paste-dies-at-74-apple-xerox-amazon-obituary



--Later, at Apple, Cut and Paste were moved from the keyset to the toolbar,
under Edit -- where they live to this day.



To sum up:

--The phrase "cut and paste" goes back centuries.

--Many early text editors had the equivalent functions, under different
names.

--Yet if we try to define "cut and paste as we know it today" it might
include:

a.  Mouse-based UI.

b.  2D selection of text.

c.  "Postfix" application of the editing commands.

d.  The names Cut and Paste for two of these operations.

e.  A dedicated key or menu item to invoke them.

--Under that umbrella, Tesler and his colleagues who built Gypsy deserve
the credit....



John S.,