[Tlhingan-hol] Puns!

[lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh]

Interesting. WordStar started out in CPM before the PC was a twinkle in Bill Gates’s eye. Wikipedia dates WordStar only by saying that it dominated word processing in the early to mid 1980s. It doesn’t say when WordStar started.

PARC goes back to 1970. Meanwhile, the article you point to doesn’t give a year for when the programmers at PARC chose to use Ctrl-V for “paste", and it doesn’t claim that they invented the idea. It just mentions that it “was chosen” by them, along side a bunch of other stuff about environments where it was used.

Basically, it’s a scattered, poorly written article that doesn’t establish much in terms of historical accuracy. It would be great if we could find one that does a better job of it so we could update Wikipedia with a better article. Me? I have even less to point to than you do. My story is just something that I heard a couple decades ago that I remember.

So, maybe the key combination predates WordStar, but this isn’t the article that establishes that with authority. And if the keystroke and function does predate WordStar, it doesn’t imply that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs didn’t both learn that keystroke combination from using WordStar, which is all I claimed in the first place.

But even that is basically a rumor that I believed, since WordStar was my second word processor (the first being SpeedScript).

potlh’a’?

ghaytanHa’.

Are there really people out there lining up to see the definitive origin of “Ctrl-V” as a keyboard shortcut for “paste”?

lojmIt tI’wI’ nuv ‘utlh
Door Repair Guy, Retired Honorably



> On Nov 7, 2015, at 11:01 PM, SuStel <sustel at trimboli.name> wrote:
> 
> On 11/7/2015 9:31 PM, lojmIt tI'wI' nuv 'utlh wrote:
>> In Wordstar, one of the earliest word processor programs, the
>> commands all used the Control key followed by a letter from a word in
>> a menu. Usually, it was the first letter, like “C” in “Copy”, but in
>> this case “moVe” was the command to paste from what would later be
>> called the clipboard, though that term had not been invented yet for
>> this function. The reason that MS Word and Windows use Control V for
>> paste is that Bill Gates used to use WordStar. Steve Jobs used it,
>> too, so Command-V does the same function in Mac OS X.
> 
> According to Wikipedia, it was the programmers at Xerox PARC who came up with Control-V as Paste.
> 
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-V>
> 
> -- 
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
> 
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