Who Invented Copy and Paste?

Imagining computing and our daily use of it without two commands like copy and paste is traumatic. They are always with us and have become much more than just two verbs; they are now an action that, depending on the goal, context, and method, carries different subjective values. Debunking a bit, in this article we reveal who was responsible for both the lack of originality and the leap in productivity—that is, who invented copy and paste.

Once, someone proposed not using commands and keyboard shortcuts like copy and paste anymore. The group's response was: We don't want to live on this planet anymore. So tied to our daily use, copy-paste has surpassed the bounds of computing itself, becoming a regular expression that occurs when someone copies an attitude, an action, or an idea from another person.

Paragraphs, sentences, keywords, links, comments, photos... everything is copyable and pasteable, which is why sharing information is also a consequence of this brilliant invention, even though today there are buttons to share directly. But let's not get confused: the computer command is new, but our culture was already a millennia-old combination of copying and pasting. That's why, at the computer level, we ask ourselves who invented copy and paste.

Larry Tesler, the inventor of copy-paste

A myth that still held some circulation spoke about copy and paste belonging to Steve Jobs and the first Apple workgroup. This, which nonetheless has an explanation, has been debunked thanks to the biographies of the true inventor of copy and paste: Larry Tesler. Tesler was a computer scientist who during the 1970s worked in the computer science department at Xerox PARC, a technology innovation center in Palo Alto, California. At that time, home computing was merely a prototype, an experimental idea that still had much to mature.

In that context, Tesler, who was working on programming a Smalltalk-76 system (1973-1976), invented a process by which text could be captured and sent to the computer's internal memory. With that method, he invented the Cut or Copy, but then he could insert it into another text field and establish the term Pasting for Paste. These terms were adopted because they were the most descriptive of the action and as a reference to an old method of editing manuscripts, where words were manually cut from one sheet and pasted onto another.

The confusion about the origin of copy-paste and its relationship with Apple comes because it was this company that first introduced copy and paste into home computing, equipping the Mac OS 1.0 with the commands that would later become popular as Command + C to copy, +X to cut, and +V to paste. The first computers to have the copy-paste combo were the Apple Lisa (1981) and Macintosh (1984).

On Windows, it arrived later but using the Ctrl key as the command trigger. To add some spice to the matter, Tesler's biography tells how Steve Jobs visited Xerox in 1979 and 'was inspired' by some ideas from those scientists, later recycling them and presenting them as his own. In that sense, Steve Jobs was an inventor of copy-paste, if you know what I mean (wink, wink).