Since Unix is 40 years old, Unix is older than the invention of the computer mouse.  (actually only 3 years if Unix is from 1969 and the mouse from 1972)  How in the world did a new user do anything on Unix without copy & paste?  I know they always had a text editor with copy/paste, but everything I do on Linux is copy from web browser, and paste (from the CLIPBOARD) into vim or gedit or gnome terminal.  You're the same, right?I just can't imagine loading up a man file into vim, copying & pasting code from it- into a temporary buffer, and then having bash execute that buffer.  This question has an answer, i'm hoping someone who knows can tell me.  Maybe they never left emacs, is that the answer?
How did they manage to drive a Unix computer before mice and copy & paste?
shell;text processing;terminal;history
Copy-paste is older than the mouse. The first unix editor, ed, had the t command to copy a bunch of lines to a different location. In vi, there are various commands to cut, yank and paste text. To copy text between files, you would save the text to copy in a temporary file and import that temporary file in the target document, e.g. with w and r in ed (:w and :r in vi). To include the output of a command in a file, you would redirect its output (mycommand >file or mycommand >>file) and import that file into your document; vi introduced the ! command and friends to directly insert the output without requiring a temporary file.Loading a man page into Vim or Emacs and copy-pasting from it is routine for Vim/Emacs users. Web browsers didn't exist until Unix was old enough to drink, but the same principle applies anywhere: the clipboard is older than window environments. What window environments brought was cross-application copy-paste, which could be done with only a little more effort through files.