IBM’s Common User Access (CUA) standard came out in 1987 and - not wanting to conflict with Control+C as a break character - defined different characters for cut, copy, and paste. It is hard to remember, but Apple didn’t always set market direction. CUA IBM CUA from 1988 via the Internet Archive The Z just happens to be the next character in that cluster–we might well have had Control+B as undo. The official story is that C was for copy, X looks like a crossout or a pair of scissors, and V looks like an insertion mark. However, there were many people involved and you can catch a video of Larry Tesler and others discussing the early history of Apple GUI and the PARC influence on it, below.Īccording to the video, the team knew that people would use cut, paste, copy, and undo quite a bit and they wanted a standard way to do that across applications. The Apple Standardīruce Tognazzini, otherwise known as Tog, was an early and influential Apple employee and wrote much of the original standard for the 1984 Macintosh. As far as I can tell, the actual control commands we think of today originated with the Apple Human Interface Standard. However, the commands used the Escape key. This 1975 word processor did allow cut and paste as we know it. The Xerox Alto was ahead of its time and it offered a graphical text editor, Gypsy. Even the ideas of putting the cursor between letters, the shape of the cursor was not obvious at the time. The commands operated on a block of text on the screen with no intermediate step. This is more akin to how some older systems like WordStar did things. While some designers favored the cut/copy/paste method we have now, others wanted a move/copy/delete/transpose. It may seem obvious now, but the right way to move text around was highly debatable back then. The new cut and paste metaphor also used fewer keys than Kanerva’s system. Early PARC software sent deleted things to a trashcan and set cut things to a wastebin. The only problem with the original system was the wording of “delete” sounded too permanent. It was a natural idea to extend the cut and paste concept to text. In the book, Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge, there is mention that the team was already working on cut and paste of elements as part of a desktop publishing application for Ginn and Company, and they knew of Kanerva’s work. Larry worked for Xerox PARC - the people who more or less invented the graphical user interface. Pentti Kanerva, from Stanford, was using delete buffers to hold text for later, a technique that caught the attention of Larry Tesler. Then again, the clipboard itself isn’t that old and it also needed inventing. So I knew there was some point in relatively recent history where the control keys took over the world. This might have been because C was for “cancel” or it could be because the ASCII for “end text” is Control+C. Control+C was well known as a break command in TOPS-10, CP/M, MSDOS, and several other systems. If you recall, though, Control+C hasn’t always been synonymous with copy. I wasn’t sure of the answer but figured it had to do with some of the user interface standards from IBM or Sun. Control+C for copy makes sense, of course, but it is still odd that it is virtually universal in an industry where everyone likes to reinvent the wheel. A friend of mine asked me the other day why we use Control+X and Control+V to manipulate the clipboard almost universally. Some things are so ubiquitous that it is hard to remember that someone had to dream them up to begin with. They don’t just spontaneously grow on trees, so some human being had to build it and probably had at least a hazy design in mind when they started it. The keyboard you type on, the light switch you turn on, even the faucet handle. I’m always fascinated that someone designed just about everything you use, no matter how trivial it is.
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