You’ve screwed up. You’ve erased something wrong in Microsoft Word, or maybe you’ve applied a brush stroke in the wrong place in Adobe Photoshop; Or you may have incorrectly moved a block of code in Visual Studio Code. Relax, breathe and don’t panic…
…because in any of those three programs (and thousands of others) you can solve all these errors in a very simple way: pressing ‘Ctrl+Z’. This keyboard shortcut is already universal in the world of computing, being present in all major operating systems (with the exception of macOS, where Command+Z is popular).
It is known that already in 1968 a program was launched, FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System), the first hypertext editor in history, which also pioneered for the first time offering the ‘Undo’ function (‘Undo’)…however, it wasn’t bound to any keyboard shortcut yet.
The idea of ’undo’ was to restore the immediately previous state of the system, which was stored in the system’s memory. However, back then you couldn’t chain successive ‘undo’ commands
But, when did the ‘Z’ start to be used in the keyboard shortcut related to undo actions on the PC (either in the company of Ctrl or Command)? If you do a search on the Internet, you will see that there are numerous websites that pose it as a mystery, and that, in any case, point to some anonymous Xerox PARC engineerwhich at some fuzzy point in the 1970s added the corresponding keyboard shortcut.
According to this version, the famous visit made by Steve Jobs in 1979 to the Xerox facilities was what motivated him to copy that innovation and include it in 1983 in his Apple Lisa equipment.
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The ‘Z’ in undo is not from an unknown father: his name is Larry
But around 2016, Larry Tesler, an expert in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (and one of the engineers who made the jump from Xerox PARC to Apple) claimed in an email Addressed to Brad A. Myers of Carnegie Mellon University, the paternity of the use of the ‘Z’ in the keyboard shortcut for ‘undo’… and placed his creation at the time when he was already working for Apple in the 80s:
“The Lisa was the first system to link [las teclas] ‘XCVZ’ to [los comandos] of Cut, Copy, Paste and Undo (moved with the “apple” key). I chose them myself: ‘X’ was a standard delete symbol; ‘C’ was the first letter of ‘copy’; ‘V’ was a reverse caret and, apparently, it already meant ‘insert’ in at least one older editor.
And Z was next to X, C, and V on the American QWERTY keyboard. But its shape also symbolized the ‘Do-Undo-Redo’ triad: top right stroke = step forward; left center stroke = step back; lower right stroke = step forward again. So X, C, and even V were not novel. But I don’t know of any use of ‘Z’ that would mean ‘Undo’ before [que lanzáramos Apple] smooth […] the nyt article [que lo vinculaba con Xerox PARC] was wrong and did not contain citations to Xerox publications.”
The reason why Tesler linked ‘Z’ to ‘redo’ as well is because at that time the shortcut didn’t work like it does today: if you clicked it once you undoed it, clicking it twice went back to redo. It was Windows that first implemented the use of ‘Y’ for ‘undo’for completing the end of the alphabet: XYZ.
It would be Lisa’s successor computer, the Macintosh, the first to adopt the tradition of including an “Undo” as the first command in the “Edit” menu, an idea that Microsoft borrowed a little later for its Windows 3.1. On the other hand, it was a third operating system, the AmigaOS, that witnessed (with the release of the CygnusEd editor) the first implementation of successive ‘Ctrl+Z’thus allowing you to undo changes beyond the last one made.
Via | howtogeek