OK
So, where did I put my QEMU 6502 emulator? :-)
The Computer History Museum has scored something of a coup, publishing – with Cupertino's permission – the source code for the Apple II's DOS, version 3.1. The archeological code, posted here, is the whole 4,000-plus – that's thousands of lines of code, not millions in a misprint – complete with comments like “if it ain't 3 …
I can clearly recall using [copy and paste] back in the mid-70s and if you check out Ritchie and Thompson's June 1970 memo describing the QED editor, you'll find it there too...
Agreed (though I suspect the post you're responding to was meant as a joke). The IBM mainframe editors had copy&paste since at least the mid-70s, with SPF (the precursor to ISPF), and I suspect the pre-SPF TSO editor had it as well, which would push it back to '71. I don't know whether early editors for, say, CMS or MTS supported copy/paste; it'd be interesting to hear from folks who used them. (I used VM/CMS in the late '80s, but never the early CP-branded versions.)
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Not ProDOS, not GS/OS, not System 7, nor A/UX... heaven forbid that NewtonOS 2.1's intimates should become public for viewing! No, gentlemen (and Ladies, too): this jewel that adorns this latest crown* in the Computer Museum collection is purely unadulterated cubic zirconium.
Let sleeping 6502s lie.
(* The crown is a conical volume, gilded with quasi-open Darwin, studded with 1.8-carat WebKit, and was last seen half-buried under PPC code that litters Dogcow's litterbox...)
"Beneath Apple DOS" was the definitive work on how to communicate with Apple DOS 3.3. iIRC it included complete disassembly with comments. Through the Apple //e one could buy a printed copy of the original source code for the monitor ROM (what people call BIOS these days). Was $10 for the //e. Was essential for understanding why characters were dropped at 1200 baud when the //e 80 column screen scrolled (bug in firmware disabled IRQ at the wrong time). Once I understood the problem I found it pretty easy to write work-alike routine which did not disable IRQ yet used the same working variables as the firmware so if something I had no control over wrote to the screen it wrote in the right place and my next write followed.