[ih] cut and paste

[Jack Haverty]

"Cut and paste" probably dates to shortly after Gutenberg.  From my high 
school days, I remember "editors" literally cutting articles into 
pieces, cutting photographs to a particular size, and then literally 
pasting the pieces onto a large piece of cardboard, the size of a 
newspaper page.  They could move things around as needed to get 
everything to fit, and putting "continued on page xx" for the pieces 
that wouldn't fit.   the paste was applied and then that piece of 
cardboard was sent off to the Printer, who painstakingly set the lead 
type into the frames for the printing press that put the page onto 
paper.   Very Ben Franklin-esque.

I've wondered what an editor might look like if it didn't just mimic 
ancient traditional non-computer practice.  Is "copy and paste" the only 
way to use computers to manipulate documents?   Perhaps with the advent 
of AI we'll see some entirely new ways of doing such things.

Jack


On 8/8/23 14:36, John Shoch via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.,