Drag and Drop was pioneered by
Apple with
Macintosh System 7.5 in mid-1994. It was a new
interface paradigm that allowed
text and
graphics to be transferred both inter-app and intra-app without involving the
clipboard. In other words, rather than taking several steps to
copy and
paste, the user simply selected the item, dragged it with the
mouse to its
destination, and dropped it off.
This sounds like a mundane feature, but at the time it was a huge timesaver for people in Design/Publishing who copy and paste thousands of times a day. With Drag and Drop came the Clipping feature (and the Secret About Box easter egg.) Clippings allowed the user to drop a block of text or a graphic to the desktop for storage. You could then drop the clipping icon back to where you wanted the text/graphic, and it would appear intact. This extended clipboard functionality to allow multiple items to be stored at once. Plus, since clippings were stored on the hard drive, you didn't have to worry about the out-of-memory errors associated with copy/paste, a big issue in 1994.