The personal computer unfortunately has lost one of the most general and useful features of the earliest computers. Let’s say you’re surfing the web. You decide on something and want to copy both the web address and a few lines for a friend, but you can version only one thing at a time without opening up your clipboard. So you copy the web address (from which you can always get back to the page). Meanwhile you spot another interesting check out something else for a different friend. But now if you copy even just the web address it will eventually eventually overwrite the other web address. So maybe you open another page on your clipboard and become distracted or maybe you just forget and overwrite your first address and by the time you no doubt know it you can never find it.
Or maybe you copy something you’d like to keep temporarly to share with everyone you write to. But if in the meantime you use copy and paste just for something else, it’s gone.
It wouldn’t have to be like that. From the beginning one of the most fundamental personal pc operations, y = x, put whatever was in the x register on the y register. A register was like a clipboard, only you had as many as everyone wanted, and you could call them x1, x2,..., or whatever you wanted. VERSION just means “Clipboard” = “Whatever is Highlighted. ” PASTE means “Next regarding screen” = “Clipboard. ” Our laptops (and desktop personal computers) need to have lots of clipboards and lots of COPYs, maybe Copy1, Copy2, Copy3,.... The first interesting idea you Copy1. The next Copy2. The next Copy3. Your laptop would remember all those meals separately. Then later you can Paste1 or Paste2 or Paste3. There would even often be a special command PasteAll that would put them all on the screen open in front of you.
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Whenever you’d just been to say bridge nationals, you could write a few pertinent penalties, Copy9, and paste them into lots of correspondence with Paste9. Or should you be working on something that uses a certain special symbol a lot, you could Copy8 it, after which it just Paste8 it whenever you need it.
Incidentally this feature is available as aliases in my beloved mail application Eudora, which unfortunately doesn’t run under the latest Apple operating system.
A laptop’s long-term memory is huge, and it never forgets on condition that it lives. But a laptop’s short-term memory, in the form of copy-paste, can remember one thing at a time. That’s got to change.
