On Monday, May 18, 2015, markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de> wrote:

[2015-05-18 06:36] Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
>
> I believe cut/paste originated in PWB Unix, but I can't recall who
> wrote it.

Thanks for your reply.

I checked the PWB code of bostic and spencer ...
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/usdl/
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1
... but couldn't find any signs of cut or paste there.

FreeBSD man page states it originated in System III. If you browse the code of it, it is certainly there, but System III was a mix of various versions, including PWB/UNIX.

Anyway, a very interesting research subject. Keep going!

--Andy