The personal computer unfortunately has lost one of the most fundamental and useful features of the earliest computers. Let’s say you’re surfing the web. You discover something and want to copy both the web address and a few lines for a friend, but you can duplicate 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 hyperlink to something else for a different friend. But now if you copy even just the web address it is going to overwrite the other web address. So maybe you open another page on your clipboard and obtain distracted or maybe you just forget and overwrite your first address and by the time you recognize it you can never find it.
Or maybe you copy something you’d like to keep for some time to share with everyone you write to. But if in the meantime you use copy and paste with regard to something else, it’s gone.
| make whiteboard video |
It wouldn’t have to be like that. From the beginning one of the most fundamental pc operations, y = x, put whatever was in the x register within the y register. A register was like a clipboard, only you had as many as a person wanted, and you could call them x1, x2,..., or whatever you wanted. DUPLICATE just means “Clipboard” = “Whatever is Highlighted. ” PASTE means “Next upon screen” = “Clipboard. ” Our laptops (and desktop personal computers) must have lots of clipboards and lots of COPYs, maybe Copy1, Copy2, Copy3,.... The first interesting point you Copy1. The next Copy2. The next Copy3. Your laptop would remember all of them separately. Then later you can Paste1 or Paste2 or Paste3. There would even become a special command PasteAll that would put them all on the screen open in front of you.
In case you’d just been to say bridge nationals, you could write a few pertinent phrases, 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 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 Mac pc operating system.
A laptop’s long-term memory is huge, and it never forgets so long as it lives. But a laptop’s short-term memory, in the form of copy-paste, can remember just one thing at a time. That’s got to change.
