The personal computer unfortunately has lost one of the most common and useful features of the earliest computers. Let’s say you’re surfing the web. You stumble upon something and want to copy both the web address and a few lines for a friend, but you can reproduce 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 chek out something else for a different friend. But now if you copy even just the web address it'd overwrite the other web address. So maybe you open another page on your clipboard and start distracted or maybe you just forget and overwrite your first address and by the time you are aware of it you can never find it.
| make a whiteboard video |
Or maybe you copy something you’d like to keep for a few years to share with everyone you write to. But if in the meantime you use copy and paste meant for something else, it’s gone.
It wouldn’t have to be like that. From the beginning one of the most fundamental desktop computer operations, y = x, put whatever was in the x register while in the y register. A register was like a clipboard, only you had as many as one wanted, and you could call them x1, x2,..., or whatever you wanted. REPRODUCE just means “Clipboard” = “Whatever is Highlighted. ” PASTE means “Next at screen” = “Clipboard. ” Our laptops (and desktop personal computers) needs lots of clipboards and lots of COPYs, maybe Copy1, Copy2, Copy3,.... The first interesting detail you Copy1. The next Copy2. The next Copy3. Your laptop would remember every one of them separately. Then later you can Paste1 or Paste2 or Paste3. There would even manifest as a special command PasteAll that would put them all on the screen open in front of you.
In cases where you’d just been to say bridge nationals, you could write a few pertinent entendement, 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, thereafter 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 Imac operating system.
A laptop’s long-term memory is huge, and it never forgets provided it lives. But a laptop’s short-term memory, in the form of copy-paste, can remember one simple thing at a time. That’s got to change.
