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Comment by JohnHammersley | Hacker News Reader

This brings back lots of memories - my first computers were the Acorn Electron and the A3000 (never realised they were the 'posh' end of the market until now), and I still remember my Dad letting me install the RAM upgrade in the A3000 despite what was undoubtedly an internal worry that he'd just opened up what was an expensive piece of kit at the time to his clumsy, all too eager son :)

I also remember programming my first games (space invader clones) in BASIC on the A3000 (and the A3020s we had at school) - fun times.

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I always thought the whatever text editor that was used on the Archimedes had a very intuitive copy/paste, if I remember correctly you could move a "second cursor" around and then pressing a key it would paste the current character in the "copy cursor" at your current location

This would make it really easy to do something like duplicate a line while changing some things, just move the copy cursor to the line/variable/thing you wanted to paste and modify, then hold the copy key until you got to where you had to change something (at your current location the characters from the other line would appear), type what you wanted, then back to the copy key for the rest of the line

Seeing my best friend at the time use it it seemed really cool, some days I think of trying to write a minor mode for emacs that lets you do that...

The copy/paste function was already there in the Beeb and the Electron.

really? interesting, wonder why it seems no other editor has something similar, or at least I don't think I've ever seen it elsewhere

Yes, confirmed the bbc and the electron already had this.

Interesting tidbit: it matched the data on the screen with the font in graphics mode, which meant that if your graphics intersected anywhere with text you wanted to copy that it stopped copying on corrupted characters. There was too little memory in those machines to keep a 'backup copy' of what was in the character cells of the screen, so the copy key function had to recover the screen contents directly.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/BBC_Micr...

You can see the keyboard here, the copy key is bottom row, rightmost key.

Introduced on the Acorn Atom - I still have my Acorn Atom, I taught myself to program on it. Built in BASIC and 6502 Assembler (which could be mixed!) and I also bought AtomForth as well. Great piece of kit.

Ah yes, you are right, the Atom had it too.

Vim has a limited form of this: control-E and control-Y in insert mode copy the character on the previous/next line (both in Emacs/Vim look for extensions about "multiple cursors" if you're interested in this feature). I remember the line editor of the CPC used to edit Basic programs also had this feature.

I use multiple cursors in Emacs all the time, but it's a really different workflow from this type of editor, with this it's like having two independent cursors, one for insert and one for "copy from here", you can switch between the two and move them around (don't remember if you could search on the copy cursor, but it would make sense you could) when you press the copy key they both move 1 char to the right and the char from the copy cursor ends up at the insert cursor, in skilled hands this can make some typical coding "copy this line and modify it slightly" quite fast

Really surprised it didn't catch on in other editors, I wonder if it could be done in emacs by having a command that copies a char from mark to point and moves them both right, as well as a different cursor to put in mark, since you can already exchange point and mark it seems this should make this functionality feasible

This copy and paste mechanism was also part of the Amstrad CPC (the first computer I've personally owned), with shift + cursor keys you could move the second cursor and there was the "copy" key.

http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/File:CPC_464_old_logo_bilgis...

thanks for the additional data point, interesting that this was so widespread but ended up more or less disappearing as a copy/paste paradigm

Me too, the A3000 was a fantastic piece of kit, I just wish I'd put more effort into leaning to program instead of playing Pandora's Box and Chocks Away.

Yes, I too spent most of my time playing games - the James Pond series was a particular favorite, along with a side-scrolling shooter with awesome music...anyone remember the name of it?

Edit: It was Nevyron: https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs

The intro music still sets the spine tingling :)

You can get James Pond on the iOS App Store.

Ah yes, I remember Nevryon too. And Cataclysm, that was amazing for the time https://youtu.be/VMlZ2MwYvuA

My first memories of using a computer was playing Stunt Racer 2000 on my Dad's Acorn, good times.

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