If you make a mistake while doing something on the computer, nothing happens. You give Ctrl+Z and the problem is solved. One of the most common, along with copy and paste, this shortcut has become a real boon today. Interestingly, the origin of Ctrl+Z is more messy, although the originator of the latter is known.

Blessed ‘Undo’ or ‘Undo’. English term (pronounced ‘)I walked‘) is already an old acquaintance with all kinds of operating systems and applications and has become an almost mandatory option in any modern application, and its blessed shortcut (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux, Command+Z on macOS) saves many annoying. situations and is one of the most useful and used today.

No one knows who created it.. Larry Tesler, who died in 2020, was the creator of the copy and paste functions (Ctrl-C / Ctrl V on Windows and Linux), but the origin of ‘Ctrl-Z’ is somewhat obscure. According to Wikipedia, the first use of this ‘Undo’ feature was by the File Retrieval and Editing System (FRESS), a hypertext editor developed by some of his students, such as Andries van Dam and Bob Wallace, at Brown University in 1968. It is not very clear how the idea came about, but from then on the proposal gained strength.

Xerox PARC kicks in. Xerox’s renowned research lab wasn’t just the birthplace of the graphical user interface: An obsession with usability furthered the concept. The Xerox PARC Bravo editor already had such an ‘Undo’ option in 1974, and in 1976 two IBM engineers agreed that it would be better to at least allow users to ‘undo’ the immediately previous command (some special ‘undo’ command). It is unknown who made this particular decision, but it was Xerox PARC that assigned the Ctrl-Z shortcut to this command.

straight. What happened next is no accident. Larry Tesler, who worked at PARC from 1973 to 1980, thus coining the concept of the ‘Undo’ function, was one of the people present at Steve Jobs’ famous 1979 visit. Apple supported the integration of the “Undo” command into the operating system, along with Lisa and another legend (Bill Atkinson).

Undo a thousand times. This initial integration only allowed undo and redo (‘Redo’) once, but in the 80s multiple levels were coming for these commands. It was like traveling back in time in your study session and quickly became a very popular option.

From UNIX and Amiga to infinity and beyond. The EMACS editor for UNIX systems (it would take several years for Linux to emerge) was one of the first, while CygnusEd was the first to offer multiple levels of “undo” and “redo” for the Amiga. The rest, as they say, is history, and indeed the concept did not stop there and was applied to other fields such as database management, for example with ‘undo’ or rollback, as well as security systems. control.

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