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by SeanLuke 1337 days ago
> Elsewhere in these comments there is also a link to an explainer for the macOS equivalent.

I know you didn't mean anything by this, but given that the entire concept of a clipboard was invented by the Mac/Lisa team (the Xerox Alto didn't have one), it seems wrong to describe it as an "equivalent" to Windows.
2 comments
jeroenhd 1337 days ago
I don't think it was the Apple Lisa that had the first clipboard. Xerox definitely had a clipboard and other experimental environments had them as well.

The Lisa was the first to name it the "clipboard" but that doesn't really count in my opinion.

Also, modern macOS isn't based on the old mac operating system after switching to Unix, so even for Apple computers the macOS clipboard is an "equivalent" of the old clipboard.

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SeanLuke 1337 days ago
> I don't think it was the Apple Lisa that had the first clipboard. Xerox definitely had a clipboard and other experimental environments had them as well.

Larry Tessler coined the terms "copy" and "paste" (basically just mark and yank) on early Xerox text editors. But AFAIK the Lisa group invented the Clipboard as a general storage mechanism for a variety of data types: and they certainly they coined the term. Here's a message from Bruce Horn, who is about as authoritative as it can get:

https://lisalist2.com/lisalist1/1796.html

> Also, modern macOS isn't based on the old mac operating system after switching to Unix, so even for Apple computers the macOS clipboard is an "equivalent" of the old clipboard.

Meh. The current MacOS clipboard is an amalgam of the NeXTSTEP pasteboard and the Carbon clipboard (derived from 9).

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lupire 1337 days ago
Coming first doesn't make it less equivalent.
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