India, Nov. 15 -- Why is the term "cut and paste"?

Well, gather around, kids, teens and anyone else under 45. Here's the ancient tale.

Before we had our screens, motherboards and hard drive, things such as advertisements in newspapers and even the odd spelling correction involved cutting strips out of physical sheets (photographic prints called bromides), and pasting the element one wanted onto the frame instead.

There were various ways to "copy", of course. By the early 1900s, there were Photostat machines that used projection technology to duplicate documents. Then came the copy machines made famous by Xerox in the 1950s.

Before all this there were hand-cranked "cyclostyle" devices that forced ink through a stencil, (in something of...