Although the mechanism was already in widespread use in early line and character editors, Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) popularized “cut and paste” in the context of computer-based text-editing while working at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1974–1975.
Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications. Apple mapped the functionalities to key-combinations consisting of the Command key (a special modifier key) held down while typing the letters X (for cut), C (for copy), and V (for paste), choosing a handful of keyboard sequences to control basic editing operations.
via Wikipedia (while Googl-ing “who invented copy and paste?”)
