Minix was made by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, not Tenebaum.
As far as you go back in computer history, all the key shortcut for editor program are weird. Emacs, for exemple, use Ctrl-W for cut Ctrl-Y for paste ( Y stand for yank ). That is bad!! If you use copy/cut/paste emacs style today ( Emacs is an old text editor on unix ) you would probably end up with wrist injury. Taking ZXCV near the control key is a lot easier. ( I assume that the guy who programmed the first app using those was using a programmer friendly editor such as emacs or vi ). So he just moved the key closer to control. This would not have happen if keyboard manufacturer had stuck with the layout of the PERFECT Sun Keyboard ( The control was positionned where we now put the completely useless CAPSLOCK key ). Imagine your caps lock is your controle key and try some Ctrl-W and Ctrl-Y cut and paste you’ll see how easy this is.
So on my part, i bet that those change were force by the keyboard layout.
And now, the publicity part!!
Use Vi and LaTeX. You’ll have no more surprise, it’s all free, the quality of the output is good enough to print a book, it’s intuitive, you have the controle over everything. Yes you got to learn a few thing before you’re up and running. But, he, that’s why we got a brain for 
Oh and i’ve been working with a couple of UI design guy, I don’t know where they get their idea but they definitely think diffentrly then most people 
Well, the very first Mac apps (MacWrite and MacPaint) used Command-P for “Plain Text”. Command-P for “Print” came later on the Mac. The adoption of Command X, C, V, and Z on the PC came yet later (after Word for Windows version 2.0 at least, which had different, weirder, keystroke equivs).
Derleth:
Or perhaps an Amiga? The AmigaOS was preemptive multitasking, wasn’t it?
OK, I’m going to show how old I am here… and how bad my memory is.
This is totally IIRC, because I haven’t been able to dig up my old ASCII books… but, I think the codes originally were:
CTRL-C = ASCII 03 ‘ETX’ or ‘BREAK’ - literally “End of Text”
CTRL-X = ASCII 18 ‘CAN’ (cancel)
CTRL-Z = ASCII 1A ‘SUB’ (substitue) - was used in almost the same way as CTRL-C on some terminals
I don’t recall what CTRL-V was, but I think it equated to ASCII 16, which was a idle sync code (for when the teletype wasn’t printing anything, but was still connected)
That was back in the old days, for sure. The GUI environment took these in whole different directions.
Windows 1.0 was out in 1985, well before System 6 for the Mac. I have a copy of it on about five 5.25" disks. (Now if only I had a 5.25" floppy drive…)
AHunter: You’re right. According to this site, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking in 1985. I think that puts it before Minix, so preemptive multitasking on desktop machines predates the *nix clones, albeit in a machine that never really caught on.
For the curious, more information on the Amiga from FOLDOC. The Amiga was big into having seperate chips to hande graphics and sound, putting it decades ahead of its time in terms of flashy interfaces and beautiful games with advanced music. All of those chips were named, interestingly enough, so you might have “Gary” or “Agnus” or “Denise” controlling video output.
Yup. The way it worked was that the [CTRL] key ‘chopped off’ bit 6 from the character. e.g A corresponds to ASCII code 0d65[sup]1[/sup] == 0x41 == 0b0100’0001, and CTRL-A corresponds to 0d01 == 0x01 == 0b0000’0001.
C == 0x43 ; CTRL-C == 0x03
For weird keyboard shortcus look no further than WordPerfect[sup]TM[/sup], which influenced a whole generation of editors. (Hands up everyone who used TurboPascal or TurboC!)
Don’t you just love CTR-K B to mark the begining of a block, CTR-K K to mark the end, end then CTRL-K C to copy it to a new location!
meta-x, let’s not start a war over vi vs emacs. They are both usefull tools [sub]although emacs is much better![/sub]
When it comes to CTRL-Z / CTRL-Y for undo/redo, it really sucks if you’re swapping french/us keyboards, as they have swapped the Z and Y keys (as well as numerous other keys… I need to look at the keys to type my name in french…)
[sup]1[/sup] I’m using the C base notation convention. 0b## for binary, 0d## for decimal and 0x##
for hexadecimal.
Oh… you mean the open-Apple key! Dangit, that picture made a lot more sense than the propeller-loooking thing.
And yes, I know the closed-Apple key worked too, but I’m a lefty.
Sorry about that. WordPerfect has a lot to answer for, but those weird keystrokes came from WordStar. In the early 80’s it was THE editor / word processor of coice.
Hey, WordStar was the best word processor I ever used on my Commodore 128 – to bad I had to boot into CP/M in order to run it.
I still use a lot of those old WordStar key commands in most Borland Software, which frustrates me when I have to use Microsoft programming editors. Which both frustrate me not running on my Mac natively. And don’t talk to me about vi!