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CurtisE's avatar

Great story, Bill. You definitely earned your 20¢ today! 😉

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Eric Jay Toll's avatar

A few months back, I was working with two members of my marketing team, a 40-something graphic artist and 30-something social media specialist. We were chatting about something nostalgic with graphics when I mentioned Exacto knife cutting and hot wax pasting. I was talking about my high school newspaper and its production from back in the 1960s, and laying out ads and graphics in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Neither knew the origin of the concept "copy and paste." An informal survey of other colleagues found none knew that "copy and paste" is a carry-over from physically copying and pasting.

To produce a "camera-ready" physical art board, the word copy was applied by using either Letraset (rub-on) or Zipatone (cut, adhere and burnish) individual letters or later, the Compugraphic (I believe that's the brand) typesetter. We also used an IBM proposational font electric typewriter with a carbon ribbon. The output was on a glossy paper or white film.

You would cut the paper as close to the font edge as possible, turn it upside down and roll a film of hot wax on the back ... or rubber cement, which was a lot more fun (but that's another story and lost amusement). Then using triagles and T-square, the content would be aligned onto the art board.

If there were a change, typo, or edit, you would take your Exacto knife with the sharp pointed blade, cut the offending material from the art board and pastethe new content into place. The rubber cement or wax made it easy to cuf the old material.

Thus, we were literally "cutting and pasting" content, the genesis of the words for the digital activity today.

A side note. A number of years ago, we printed some display boards (using computer graphics to create the artboard) for an event. Something changed at the last minute and the already printed boards needed to be altered. There was no time for reprints.

I was the only person on the communications team who knew how to literally cut the old copy and paste in the new copy so it didn't appear to be something pasted at the last minute. Some old skills never die.

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