The history of one of computing most enduring commands – cut & paste

After the passing of computer scientist Larry Tesler, we take a look at one of his most famous and most used contributions to the IT industry; cut, copy and paste.

It’s one of the most robust and enduring set of computer commands in the industry, a mainstay of text editing since it was first introduced back in the 1970s. Cut, copy and paste has outlasted numerous other commands and software features that proved only to be brief flickers in the footnotes of computer history by comparison.

So lasting are the copy & paste commands, the term has become practically synonymous with moving or duplicating anything on a computer from one location to another. In fact, the term even frequently spills over into the real world!

The cut, copy and paste features are present on almost every type of personal computer, including PCs, notebooks, tablets and smartphones. Those with a fuller knowledge of computing may associate cut, copy and paste as originating with earlier Apple computers, but actually the commands themselves actually go back a little further.

Sponsored Content. Continued below...

It was around 1975, when Larry Tesler and Tim Mott – working for the Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center – were developing a word processing program called Gypsy, where the cut and paste commands were born. In a similar fashion to how modern word processors work today, a user could simply highlight the text they wanted to move or copy, select the cut or copy function key and then select the destination in the document and press the paste key.

We take this relatively simple task for granted today, but this was the first time that copying or moving text was that simple to perform on a computer. A previous word processor, called Bravo, involved a more complex “mode” feature that would perform the same function.

Larry Tesler in 2007

Tesler moved to Apple in 1980, taking the cut-copy-paste functionality with him – a functionality that was implemented into some of the early 1980’s Apple computers including the Macintosh, and it was then that the commands became associated with the keyboard letters X, C and V (at the same time the Undo feature became associated with the letter Z.)

As for the words Cut, Copy and Paste, these words chosen by Tesler derive from the earlier technique of modifying documents (especially manuscripts) by hand, where sections of text were literally cut using a pair of cutting scissors and pasted (glued) to a new location.

Tesler’s work extends beyond text editing, and even his innovative work with word processors has had a substantial effect on other areas of computer usability; after all, cut, copy and paste are now commands that work far outside the boundaries of just word processing.

Larry Tesler passed away on February 17th 2020 at the age of 74.