Saturday 24 September 2016

Exactly why a Laptop Is Not a Computer

The personal computer unfortunately has lost one of the most simple and useful features of the earliest computers. Let’s say you’re surfing the web. You will find something and want to copy both the web address and a few lines for a friend, but you can replicate 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 url to something else for a different friend. But now if you copy even just the web address it will eventually overwrite the other web address. So maybe you open another page on your clipboard and have distracted or maybe you just forget and overwrite your first address and by the time you understand it you can never find it.

Or maybe you copy something you’d like to keep for a time to share with everyone you write to. But if in the meantime you use copy and paste regarding something else, it’s gone.
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It wouldn’t have to be like that. From the beginning one of the most fundamental personal computer operations, y = x, put whatever was in the x register inside the y register. A register was like a clipboard, only you had as many as an individual wanted, and you could call them x1, x2,..., or whatever you wanted. REPLICATE just means “Clipboard” = “Whatever is Highlighted. ” PASTE means “Next in screen” = “Clipboard. ” Our laptops (and desktop personal computers) really should have lots of clipboards and lots of COPYs, maybe Copy1, Copy2, Copy3,.... The first interesting factor you Copy1. The next Copy2. The next Copy3. Your laptop would remember them separately. Then later you can Paste1 or Paste2 or Paste3. There would even be considered a special command PasteAll that would put them all on the screen open in front of you.

When you’d just been to say bridge nationals, you could write a few pertinent content, 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, and after that 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 Macintosh operating system.

A laptop’s long-term memory is huge, and it never forgets provided that it lives. But a laptop’s short-term memory, in the form of copy-paste, can remember only 1 thing at a time. That’s got to change.

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