Regarding the overloading of Ctrl-C on Windows - The story is actually a bit more complex. In DOS, Ctrl-C command was not originally overloaded. Ctrl-Ins was C

Regarding the overloading of Ctrl-C on Windows - The story is actually a bit more complex. In DOS, Ctrl-C command was not originally overloaded. Ctrl-Ins was Copy. Shift-Del was Cut, Shift-Ins was Paste. Both Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Break were abort. Macs, however, did not originally have the Ins or Del keys, and thus needed different shortcuts. Besides, Jobs would never have copied DOS. He didn't even want arrow keys on the original Mac 128K, but finally acquiesced. As Windows began to mimick the "look and feel" of the Mac OS, they adopted the use of the Ctrl key as a substitute for the Cmd key. In other words, it was because Microsoft was copying pre-existing commands from Apple, but transposing them to Ctrl, that they ended up with ambiguous commands. Ctrl-Ins and Shift-Ins continued to work for several versions of Windows. At the same time, newer versions of Word and other Microsoft DOS applications began to support the newer Windows shortcuts. Since I was thoroughly used to those shortcuts from my use of QuickBasic and Word for DOS, I continued to use the original shortcuts in Windows until they no longer worked, and only then did I switch to Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.