Even if you do not have high computer skills, it is very likely that you know how to cut and copy words, sentences or entire paragraphs from one document or text field to another. We do it so often in everyday life that we take it for granted. We do it on the computer, laptop, tablet, mobile … It is one of those basic functions that we can do at the computer level, but can you imagine it did not exist? Our time with the devices would be much less efficient.
For most, using the keyboard combination Control + C (copy) and Control + V (paste), as well as Control + X (cut), has become a very common action, since it is a fundamental tool to restructure a portion of text with a very simple command, as well as images, videos … They are the most basic keyboard shortcuts that exist.
To whom do we owe this function?
Its inventor is Larry Tesler , who was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1945, and studied at Stanford University in California. After graduation, he specialized in user interface design, that is, making computer systems easier to use. He became an expert in computer science who in the 1970s while working in the IT department of Xerox PARC, a technology innovation center based in Palo Alto, California (USA), devised a process by which text could be captured and sent to a computer’s internal memory. This is how copy & paste would be born as a system to improve productivity in all areas related to the computer.
Tesler was working on the programming of the Smalltalk-76 system between 1973-76, and it was in that project that he implemented a method to capture text in the internal memory of a computer, that is, “cut” / “copy”, and then insert it. . elsewhere, that is, “paste”. Verbs grew out of the old idea of manuscript editing, when words had to be physically cut out on one page with scissors and glued elsewhere.
The first machines that integrated the possibility of the copy and paste command were Apple Lisa (1981) and Macintosh (1984).
A pioneer in computing
Tesler had quite a fruitful life in the tech community over the decades: he worked in the biotechnology field, as a computer scientist at Apple, and was even vice president at Amazon.com and Yahoo! (2009 was when he became part of the company’s consulting team).
The Silicon Valley Museum of Computer History said Tesler “combined computer science training with a countercultural vision that computers should be for everyone.”
The man who invented copy and paste died in February 2020 at the age of 74, although the details of his death were not released. It was the Xerox Corporation itself, through its Twitter account, in charge of delivering the sad news to the world.
