“Life would be so nice if there was a key
Which could undo any errs by you or me!
But then that’s not possible my grace!
Just try not to err in the first place!”
These are probably the most common short cuts you use in your life! Not the one where you cook rice and dal together in the cooker! But in the computer!
The ubiquitous shortcuts so linked to windows were actually developed in Apple!
Read on!
The other day I was typing one of these blogs in my mac and since I was not used to the short cuts by Apple, I pressed CTRL and C and all it yielded was ‘c’! I never use my iphone for any prolonged typing since I like the One plus better and my iPad is just a Simpson watching pad for me!
Then I had to unlearn the most common shortcut keys most windows users would know and use as many times as possible!
The CTRL c or v or z and finally x are maybe one of the commonest pressed keys in the history of world computing! This is for the general public who are not computer grads or software professionals of course!
Your level of computer literacy is then dependent on the number of shortcut keys you know! At one time I used to even know the shortcut keys of Adobe Pagemaker and other softwares and had impressed quite a few people including my future wife!
Another way you can recognize a computer wiz is how many keys for shortcut he knows and how long can he or she avoid touching the mouse!
If you can start, browse and create word document and maybe even print it without touching the mouse or faster than a person using the mouse then you are the real deal!
Short cuts such as ALT with other functions like close a window or open one! Not to mention using them to print without using the mouse!
Among all these shortcuts though the most popular and the ones which are known to most are the ones for copy and paste! My favourite though is the undo!
So when I was trying the same with Apple, it was very frustrating that it had its own set of shortcut keys! Instead of CTRL you are supposed to use this button with an odd design called the Command! I was so irritated with Apple (again!) that it shows that it does not follow the routine!
Then when I was looking at the history, it dawned on me that it was Apple which had these shortcuts first! So let me put aside my personal dislike for Apple and dive into the wonderful person who invented this superb shortcuts!
The story goes in this way; while developing the user interface for Lisa, Apple programmer Larry Tesler chose to use the Z, X, C, and V keys in conjunction with Lisa’s Apple key to represent Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste. Together, they made Apple+Z, Apple+X, Apple+C, and Apple+V.
When investigated on why she chose these letters it was described in her own words as below.
She in fact chose them herself. X was a standard symbol of deletion. C was the first letter of Copy. V was an upside down caret and apparently meant Insert in at least one earlier editor!
Z was next to X, C and V on the U.S. QWERTY keyboard. But its shape also symbolized the “Do-Undo-Redo” triad: top rightward stroke = step forward; middle leftward stroke = step back; bottom rightward stroke = step forward again!
Tesler also notes that the Apple+Z key originally served as both an Undo and a Redo key—instead of the multi-step Undo we now know today (with Ctrl+Y usually being Redo on Windows), which makes his symbolic explanation of the letter “Z” for Undo make more sense!
These keys are also handy in that they are located in the lower-left corner of the keyboard near meta keys such as Apple (on the Lisa), Command (on the Mac), and Control (on PCs). So if you’re using a computer’s mouse with your right hand, you can quickly trigger these frequently-used functions with your left hand!
When Apple developed the Macintosh, it brought forward the Lisa’s Z/X/C/V keyboard shortcuts but adapted them for the Command key that was unique to the Mac platform like I got to know now! So on a Mac in 1984, as with today, you’d press Command+Z for Undo, Command+X for Cut, Command+C for Copy, and Command+V for paste!
Now also note that everything is not because of Apple! In fact the the actual concepts for Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste originated earlier with interfaces for software developed for the Xerox Alto in the 1970s!
Finally the most popular place for these shortcuts which we all know! The windows! At the dawn of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) era for Microsoft, Apple licensed some elements of the Macintosh OS to Microsoft for Windows 1.0, but Redmond took care to not exactly duplicate the Macintosh interface. It’s probably no surprise then that between Windows 1.0 and Windows 3.0, Microsoft originally assigned different shortcuts for Undo, Cut, Copy and Paste than the ones most people use today:
Undo: Alt+Backspace
Cut: Shift+Delete
Copy: Ctrl+Insert
Paste: Shift+Insert
You would be surprised to know that windows still supports these legacy shortcuts!
The at some point during the development of Windows 3.1, Microsoft brought Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C, and Ctrl+V to Windows as well.
They had already appeared in Word for Windows 2.0 in 1991! And the legacy continues! Another great legacy of close to 7500 songs and around 7 national awards is held by birthday celebrity Vairamuthu Ramasamy!
Now use ALT and F4 and turn off your computer and sleep!
Shubh Ratri
ramadocblog 