Copy & Paste... It's ok!

As a kid in the eighty’s decade in India, we did not have the luxury of computers. I finished my four years of engineering without a computer of my own. I know, you might be raising those eyebrows but yes, it’s true!

The journey started from the special AC room in the school which had those big bulky white boxes with small square screens. Shoes had to be removed as the dust was strictly not authorized for entrance. One of the first few things I learnt was the MS-DOS COPY command! The journey from MS-DOS to Linux happened in the early 90s. Bigger floppies started getting a little smaller but the real revolution happened for students like us when Windows made a stunning entry in 1995. Fingers started making the muscle memory of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. The very next year another big entrance - “Cyber Café”. Late 90s was the time when the Cyber Cafés began showing up at the top of the pocket money expense list for many students surpassing the theatre costs by a great margin. And we started doing more of something.. copy & paste!

Even in the “olden days”; how my son describes my childhood when there were no shortcut keys, I do remember doing a lot of copy and paste! Copy-paste some of the grandfather’s stories to earn our teacher’s appreciation. Copy mom’s wardrobe organizing techniques to earn few hugs. Copy dad’s heavy dialogues to friends and family to earn some time out in a dark room and copy some advertisement tagline and paste in a family gathering to embarrass our parents! Net-net copy-paste was very much there! As time passed we just got better at it. In our programming class, we copy-pasted the looping logic and added our state check function, in lab reports copy-pasted the summary and added our own experiment result and even copy-pasted some part of the graduation speech! Ultimately graduation generated somewhat similar emotions for most of us.

After all these years of working; many times I tell my team to be commercial and use the solutions available and not reinvent them. Hold on; am I not asking them to copy-paste? Guess I am; just with open eyes. Elementally copy and paste is not all that bad, right? We just need to know “what to copy and where to paste and give the credit to the creator!”