Clipboard - Cut and Paste [Transcription of Video]

Nelson: Let's talk a little bit about writing. The process of writing is basically the process of re-writing. This is what you are always taught. And the words cut and paste have always symbolized to me the quintessence of human creativity. The cut and paste process, which I will show you in this video, is cutting things up, and putting them together in a different order. Now that's not what they would have you believe at Apple and that's not what they would have you believe at Windows, and that's what ticks me off. The reason I say this is because I am deeply angry at whatever technoid that changed the meanings of the words cut and paste from their true meaning of the parallel consideration of rearranged text on a table top to the hide and plug functions that we associate with the so called Macintosh clipboard. A clipboard which is just like any other clipboard, except you can't see it, anything you put on it destroys what was there previously, and if the phone rings, you lose the contents. It is like a real clipboard in every way, except that there are no aspects in which it is.

So, this garbagie, vile, piece of software, which is built into the Macintosh at the basement level, has then been re-baptized with the holy words cut and paste. Now, when I was a freshman in college, my first job was at The New York Times, and I was a copy boy. I filled the paste buds. I literally went to a great big bucket of library paste that was made from flour and water and filled all the buds and put them around the city desk so when the guys would cut up their articles and paste them together in a particular order. That is what rewriting is about. I do this for from 3 to 6 hours a day. But there are no software tools that allow you to do it. None! I've been trying to build a software tool that would allow you to do it for 35 years. The paper I wrote 30 years ago for the ACM conference detailed the method by which this should be done, and we finally just implemented a prototype of it at the Sapporo HyperLab.

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