It's a conflation of two meanings of "clip": "to cut" or "to hold together". I'd always assumed that the software "clipboard" derived not from the common "board with a clip" but from a "board for clippings", as might have been used in a design firm in the days when cut, copy, and paste were done with an X-acto knife, a Xerox machine, and glue:
I haven't been able to find evidence of this alternate meaning for "clipboard", though, as modern use has rendered it un-Googleable. The best I've been able to find is that its use in computing probably started somewhere between Xerox PARC and the Apple Lisa:
I find it fascinating, though, that this word has stuck, propagated essentially by word-of-mouth -- like the contents of the clipboard itself, the word is generally not shown in user interfaces. "Scrapbook", the name of the clipboard management utility in the original Macintosh OS, would have made a lot more sense semantically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paste_up
I haven't been able to find evidence of this alternate meaning for "clipboard", though, as modern use has rendered it un-Googleable. The best I've been able to find is that its use in computing probably started somewhere between Xerox PARC and the Apple Lisa:
http://www.liquidinformation.org/onxeaplaprog.html
I find it fascinating, though, that this word has stuck, propagated essentially by word-of-mouth -- like the contents of the clipboard itself, the word is generally not shown in user interfaces. "Scrapbook", the name of the clipboard management utility in the original Macintosh OS, would have made a lot more sense semantically.