clipboard

operating system A temporary memory area, used to transfer

information within a document being edited or between

documents or between programs. The fundamental operations are

"cut" which moves data from a document to the clipboard,

"copy" which copies it to the clipboard, and "paste" which

inserts the clipboard contents into the current document in

place of the current selection.

Different Graphical User Interfaces vary in how they handle

the different types of data which a user might want to

transfer via the clipboard, some (e.g. the X Window System)

support only plain text, others (e.g. NEXTSTEP) support

arbitrarily typed data.

(1996-08-23)