I was speaking to someone and said that I thought Ctrl-C, X & V came from:
I can’t find anything about it on the net. Any of you have the straight dope (or even a WAG 
)?
Ctrl-Z is sometimes used for Undo. I know it is in MSPaint and Notepad. That might have something to do with it.
When Windows first came out in the 1980s, the Ctrl-XCV keys did not do any cutting, copying or pasting. The key mappings were, in fact, as follows:
cut = Ctrl+Del
copy = Ctrl+Ins
paste = Shift+Ins
The decision to start using Ctrl-C for copy, Ctrl-X for cut, and Ctrl-V for paste, was actually stolen from the Macintosh. From the very earliest days, the key mappings on the Mac were:
cut = Command+X
copy = Command+C
paste = Command+V
… where “Command” is that cloverleaf, propeller-looking key that exists only on Macintosh keyboards.
Incidentally, in most Windows apps, Ctrl-Del, Ctrl-Insert, and Shift-Insert will STILL work as keyboard shortcuts for cut, copy, and paste to this day.
tracer nailed it. Command + Z is undo. I’ll stop there and not elaborate on what ELSE was swiped from the Mac GUI. Wouldn’t want to wind up in the pit, or GD. 
Just remember: Windows supported cooperative multitasking from Day One, but the Mac didn’t do cooperative multitasking until the coming of Multifinder (which didn’t emerge until MacOS version 6, I believe). So there. 
OK, fine. Where did the Mac guys get that mapping from?
What drives me nuts about it is that ^C is ASCII 3 – which is historically the Freakin’ BREAK code.
This leads to stupid situations like the one I ran into at my last place of employment-- we connected to our inventory program (in Calgary) through a Telnet window. It wasn’t the most intelligent bit of software on the face of the earth, and someone trying to cut and paste, (let’s say a serial number,) out of it into another document would cause the whole shebang to go down, and all work ceased until they’d fire the program back up again in Calgary. Although the “IT” folks admitted they didn’t know how to screen out certain characters, :rolleyes: they wouldn’t send me the freakin’ source code so I could fix it myself. “Just don’t press control-c!”
WAG:
X looks like you are crossing something out. V is similar to the caret.
Oh, and regards to the OP, control-V is used to paste because control-p was already being used for “Print screen” in the ASCII scheme.
JS Princeton: I sometimes give newbie friends basic computer lessons and these are the mnemonics I teach them:
Ctrl-C: Look at the two C’s and think “copy.”
Ctrl-X: The X looks like a scissors that cuts.
Ctrl-V: V looks like an arrow dropping something into the text.
Something similar to this may have been the original logic. It helps that XCV are next to each other, too. (Makes Ctrl-Y for Redo damned inconvenient, though.)
Thanks, Scarlett67. I have had trouble remembering these things. No excuse now!
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I’ve been running into programs that use CTRL+SHIFT+Z for redo. (Dreamweaver and Photoshop, IIRC.) Is this becoming common, or is it just for us weirdo web designers?
</hijack>
Look at the order of items in the Edit menu: Undo, Cut, Copy, Paste. Now look at the bottom row of keys: Z, X, C, V.
My WAG is they picked the bottom row because it was closest to the Command key, and just assigned keys to items in the same order as the menu.
tracer:
Well, you could do cooperative multitasking under System 4, but it was more of an afterthought. You had to launch a program called “Switcher” and then launch subsequent programs using Switcher. Once you had them running, you could sequence through them by clicking the arrows of the “Switch” icon that would appear where the System 6 Application icon (and, yet later, the System 7 Application Menu) would eventually be. Screen shot
When did Windows 1.0 ship, btw? Did it really predate System 6? I’ve never even SEEN a copy of Windows 1.x…or 2.x for that matter…
The mac guys stole it from Xerox. I believe the cut &paste editor developed in the PARC used those shortcuts.
I have never seen Windows 1.0, either – my only exposure to it was via a book on using Windows 1.0 I happened to stumble across in a library, and via Petzold’s book on Windows programming where he fleetingly referred to it as the Bad Old Days. Windows in Windows 1.0 were tiled; that is, they were not allowed to overlap. Supposedly, it came out in 1985, and would run on a PC with 320K of RAM and two double-density 5-1/4" floppy drives (no hard drive was necessary).
Windows 2.x, however, I not only used but actually wrote a “Hello, world!” program for in 1987. It was similar to Windows 3.0 except that it ran only in the Real Mode of the Intel processor (i.e. it would run on an 8086/8088), icons were only black-and-white like cursors were, the buttons weren’t 3-D (they looked rather suspiciously like Macintosh pushbuttons), and all the fonts all had to be MONOSPACE (like Courier). I could count the number of commercial applications developed for Windows 2.x on my fingers and still have fingers left over.
Of historical interest is the fact that the Windows code was pretty much ripped off from the OS/2 Presentation Manager code that Microsoft was writing for IBM. Those of us who have had to write apps for both operating systems notice an eerie similarity between, for example, Windows messages and OS/2 windowing messages (right down to their names, e.g. WM_CREATE, WM_LBUTTONDOWN, etc.).
If you look at this GUI history, you’ll see that the creation of keyboard Menus goes back to the dawn of time. Xerox Parc is credited with Cut/Copy/Paste with a mouse, but Apple/Lisa gets credit for pulldown Menus and Menu bars. That makes the use of the Z,X,C,V shortcuts for those menu items a more complicated story than a simple case of feature theft.
Wow, thanks guys.
To summarise (with a few more WAGs by me ):
Windows stole it from the Mac, which may have taken it from the PARC (or earlier?).
Command-C was probably used because it makes sense and is close to the Command key - if it was up near the P it probably wouldn’t have been used.
X made sense as cut - “ex”, crossing out & scissors.
V may have been chosen over Z for paste as it looks like a caret. Also, it looks a bit like the tip of a brush/arrow. Alternatively, Undo may have been seen as more important and was therefore mapped to the first key, leaving paste with V.
Command-P wasn’t used because it was all the way on the other side of the keyboard. Also, it was already in use in the ASCII scheme (I don’t fully understand this one, but presumably the people assigning the keys were familiar with ASCII and already associated Command-P with Print Screen).
It’s possible that all the above is BS and actually they just assigned the nearest keys in any old order, discovering along the way that Command-C was coincidentally Copy. Thinking about it, they had a 50% chance of mapping C to a C word .
>> Windows supported cooperative multitasking from Day One
Yeah, but what about uncooperative multitasking? That’s what I really need. An OS which can keep my applications in line.
sailor: For real (ie, preemptive) multitasking, you need an OS based around Unix. Unix has had preemptive multitasking since the 1970s, but until the 1990s you needed a minicomputer to run it because no PC hardware could support the notion of having protected memory or seperate concurrent processes. One of the first stabs at making a Unix-like OS for the home computer was called Minix, made by Andrew Tenebaum for educational purposes. (As an aside, Minix contained no Unix source code and so was in no way owned by AT&T. It is, rather, owned by Prentice-Hall and the sources are free to download.) Briefly, there was a question over whether Minix or Linux would dominate the PC Unix-like OS world.
Minix never caught on, but it begat Linux when a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds with more free time than sense wrote a kernel that allowed the FSF (Free Software Foundation), Richard Stallman’s baby based around the idea that software should all be open-source and freely distributable, to complete one of the main aims of their GNU (GNU’s Not Unix, a project that aims to create a Unix-like open-source OS) project: Get a functional Unix-like OS that conforms with the open-source philosophy. Linux is, therefore, a kernel called Linux that works with the FSF’s GNU software. So Stallman would argue (vehemently) that the correct term is GNU/Linux. But Linux is the common term, and only a few groups (like the completely volunteer Debian outfit) call it GNU/Linux. As an aside, the GNU project is still working on its own OS. Called Hurd, it has been vaporware for over a decade now and it isn’t expected to be done soon. Linux seems to be the GNU vehicle of choice, no matter how much Stallman might want it to be different.
So where does this get the end-user? With a functional OS fudamentally different from the Major Players in the desktop OS world. Linux is multitasking, whereas (until recently) both the MacOS and MS-Windows were based around fundamentally single-tasking core code (they have since moved on: MacOS X is based around BSD (another Unix-like desktop OS made by a group at Berkeley and released under a different licensing system than Linux) and Windows XP has no 16-bit MS-DOS code). Linux supports true memory protection, whereas pre-X Macs didn’t and Windows XP still doesn’t. Finally, Linux can be had for free (numerous ways, including by downloading burnable CD-ROM images (ISO-9660 images) for CD-ROM installation disks), whereas Windows XP is rather expensive and MacOS can only be had by buying an Apple computer.
