4 ms·

I'm not sure if people realize, but "Copy" and "Paste" and "Cut" aren't just metaphors. There used to be entire jobs dedicated to people manually doing this wit

I'm not sure if people realize, but "Copy" and "Paste" and "Cut" aren't just metaphors. There used to be entire jobs dedicated to people manually doing this with scissors, glue, tape, etc. to save time for senior execs who couldn't spend the time to rewrite their documents. And by that, I mean... the typewriters were pretty unforgiving of any typo, although the the IBM Selectix did have a key with whiteout ink, which was nice... imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline...

ghaff 7y ago
Also with newspaper production after photo typesetting came in but pre-Pagemaker, etc. Columns of copy were output and they were glued onto layout pages. Length was adjusted by cutting the copy at some point--hence, inverted pyramid style and mistakes were corrected by outputting new copy which was pasted over the old copy.
- gumby 7y ago
  There were computer typesetting systems before Pagemaker (e.g. Quadex) though they were dedicated systems. Pagemaker replaced them.
- BashiBazouk 7y ago
  Not glue. Hot wax. You can put down and pull up hot wax easily. Basically you have photo blue grid layout boards. Photo type setting, border tape and various photographic techniques. Mask mode in Photoshop is red because of rubylith which was a red film you would cut around a photograph and since red light does not expose B&W film, one could make the background white. All the layout just had to last long enough to expose the negative to which was then used to make the off-set printing plate. I grew up in a graphic arts photography studio in the pre-computer graphic arts days. My father had an 1942 ATF camera, which was about 14 feet long and you were the "mechanism" in the darkroom placing the film on a vacuum board, exposing the film and running it through a processor for positive film or the usual three trays for negative film. The camera was originally made for WWII to enlarge surveillance photographs and had very little lens distortion. Photo typesetting was expensive. Many times the way to fix spelling errors was to copy the type setting on to positive film then find the missing letters and with hot wax and an exacto knife, fix the error. I think it was cost of photo type setting that pushed graphic artists to get a mac and an early laser printer. Photo type setting was vastly better quality, but we would have the graphic artist print all their type out at 200% then reduce that down to 50% with the stat camera to get the resolution up. As a teenager, it was always a rite of passage, especially with the girls, that you got your forearm hot waxed. Fun times...
  - ghaff 7y ago
    >hot wax Yeah, I actually knew that. We were using this tech at student papers in the late 1970s, early 80s. (And I was also the production director for a student group that had some offset presses and did poster design. The typesetting tech for that was more primitive than the newspaper had; you manually cranked the right letter in position and exposed it.
  - mattkevan 7y ago
    We used to use a rubber and solvent based glue called cow gum. Good, because it was re-positionable and didn’t mark the paper. Bad because after a couple of hours the solvent would get you high and give you a cracking headache. My dad is a graphic designer who spent quite a bit of his career working pre-computer. One story he told was of a colleague who seemed to always make his columns of typeset text perfectly fit The space available. Turned out he’d just fold anything extra underneath, not caring that the last bits were missing.
TravHatesMe 7y ago
The guy who invented copy/paste, Larry Tesler, recently passed away last month. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 > Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere. > The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year. Here is Larry's website. RIP. http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html
TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline... I would hope that in that era, people would be more forgiving of tipex'd mistakes?
Razengan 7y ago
> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline... Yes. It's hard to comprehend how easy we have it today in so many things, and how so many things today will seem ghastly archaic tomorrow. We tolerate limitations of tools because the alternative was not having the tool at all. Typewriters would have been a shining godsend for people who had only ever written by hand, so what's a little effort spent in correcting mistakes?
perl4ever 7y ago
I learned to type at about 7 or 8 on what I believe was a surplus IBM model B electric typewriter, from before the selectric ball was invented. It didn't have a "one" key, you had to use a lowercase "ell". It was battleship gray, and it had a metal shell about as heavyweight as the bodywork on a 50s car, not to mention it had a steel chassis, innards that looked like a sewing machine if you unlatched the hinged cover, belt drive that ran constantly and idled with a noise reminiscent of the V8s of the era, and hurt about as much if you dropped it on your foot. The keys were very light, unlike what I've heard about the portable typewriters journalists used to carry. Barely touch them and it would go "snap, snap, snap" and then the carriage return would delicately release a spring with a click and send the massive carriage with the sheet of paper back "hrmmmmmmmmm..kaCHUNK" and you'd better not get a finger pinched in there. And if you pressed the "shift" key, several pounds of metal would actually be shifted instantly with a loud clunk you could feel to align the capital letters on the hammers. I'm pretty sure it was the non-executive model at this link: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro.html https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro... Anyway, I remember using both whiteout and the tape that you typed over to erase letters.
sitkack 7y ago
Not rigorous of course, but copy/paste/cut should form a group like map/fold, algebraic structures are everywhere.

ghaff 7y ago

Also with newspaper production after photo typesetting came in but pre-Pagemaker, etc. Columns of copy were output and they were glued onto layout pages. Length was adjusted by cutting the copy at some point--hence, inverted pyramid style and mistakes were corrected by outputting new copy which was pasted over the old copy.

gumby 7y ago
There were computer typesetting systems before Pagemaker (e.g. Quadex) though they were dedicated systems. Pagemaker replaced them.
BashiBazouk 7y ago
Not glue. Hot wax. You can put down and pull up hot wax easily. Basically you have photo blue grid layout boards. Photo type setting, border tape and various photographic techniques. Mask mode in Photoshop is red because of rubylith which was a red film you would cut around a photograph and since red light does not expose B&W film, one could make the background white. All the layout just had to last long enough to expose the negative to which was then used to make the off-set printing plate. I grew up in a graphic arts photography studio in the pre-computer graphic arts days. My father had an 1942 ATF camera, which was about 14 feet long and you were the "mechanism" in the darkroom placing the film on a vacuum board, exposing the film and running it through a processor for positive film or the usual three trays for negative film. The camera was originally made for WWII to enlarge surveillance photographs and had very little lens distortion. Photo typesetting was expensive. Many times the way to fix spelling errors was to copy the type setting on to positive film then find the missing letters and with hot wax and an exacto knife, fix the error. I think it was cost of photo type setting that pushed graphic artists to get a mac and an early laser printer. Photo type setting was vastly better quality, but we would have the graphic artist print all their type out at 200% then reduce that down to 50% with the stat camera to get the resolution up. As a teenager, it was always a rite of passage, especially with the girls, that you got your forearm hot waxed. Fun times...
- ghaff 7y ago
  >hot wax Yeah, I actually knew that. We were using this tech at student papers in the late 1970s, early 80s. (And I was also the production director for a student group that had some offset presses and did poster design. The typesetting tech for that was more primitive than the newspaper had; you manually cranked the right letter in position and exposed it.
- mattkevan 7y ago
  We used to use a rubber and solvent based glue called cow gum. Good, because it was re-positionable and didn’t mark the paper. Bad because after a couple of hours the solvent would get you high and give you a cracking headache. My dad is a graphic designer who spent quite a bit of his career working pre-computer. One story he told was of a colleague who seemed to always make his columns of typeset text perfectly fit The space available. Turned out he’d just fold anything extra underneath, not caring that the last bits were missing.

TravHatesMe 7y ago

The guy who invented copy/paste, Larry Tesler, recently passed away last month. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695 > Possibly Mr Tesler's most famous innovation, the cut and paste command, was reportedly based on the old method of editing in which people would physically cut portions of printed text and glue them elsewhere. > The command was incorporated in Apple's software on the Lisa computer in 1983, and the original Macintosh that was released the following year. Here is Larry's website. RIP. http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html http://nomodes.com/Larry_Tesler_Consulting/Home.html

TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago

> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline... I would hope that in that era, people would be more forgiving of tipex'd mistakes?

Razengan 7y ago

> imagine teachers writing tests and quizzes, though. Imagine procrastinating students making a last minute typo in a thesis... at 3AM day of the deadline... Yes. It's hard to comprehend how easy we have it today in so many things, and how so many things today will seem ghastly archaic tomorrow. We tolerate limitations of tools because the alternative was not having the tool at all. Typewriters would have been a shining godsend for people who had only ever written by hand, so what's a little effort spent in correcting mistakes?

perl4ever 7y ago

I learned to type at about 7 or 8 on what I believe was a surplus IBM model B electric typewriter, from before the selectric ball was invented. It didn't have a "one" key, you had to use a lowercase "ell". It was battleship gray, and it had a metal shell about as heavyweight as the bodywork on a 50s car, not to mention it had a steel chassis, innards that looked like a sewing machine if you unlatched the hinged cover, belt drive that ran constantly and idled with a noise reminiscent of the V8s of the era, and hurt about as much if you dropped it on your foot. The keys were very light, unlike what I've heard about the portable typewriters journalists used to carry. Barely touch them and it would go "snap, snap, snap" and then the carriage return would delicately release a spring with a click and send the massive carriage with the sheet of paper back "hrmmmmmmmmm..kaCHUNK" and you'd better not get a finger pinched in there. And if you pressed the "shift" key, several pounds of metal would actually be shifted instantly with a loud clunk you could feel to align the capital letters on the hammers. I'm pretty sure it was the non-executive model at this link: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro.html https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_intro... Anyway, I remember using both whiteout and the tape that you typed over to erase letters.

sitkack 7y ago

Not rigorous of course, but copy/paste/cut should form a group like map/fold, algebraic structures are everywhere.