Mysterious scissors

 OK, somebody here HAS to know what these are.  Instead of dividing a piece
of paper into two pieces, these scissors also snip out a narrow strip of
paper between the two major pieces.  The only writing on them is 'G.A.I.
Stainless Japan'.

Any ideas?

--
Cheers,
Bev
=======================================================================
"Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change,
  the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the
  bodies of the people who pissed me off."

 
paper into two

major pieces.  The

An early attempt at "cut and paste"?

Don

 Don K wrote:

paper into two

major pieces.  The

Oooh, don't let Ted Nelson (who can claim at least part of the credit
for inventing the idea of hypertext) hear you say that!!!  I was actually
at the New Paradigms in Computing conference in 1996 when he literally
pounded on the podium and delivered a rant (from which the following is
taken) about this new thing called the Web and how its version of
hypertext was inferior to his.

 From http://www.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/npuc97/1996/tnelson.htm  :

    And I was furious at the process at writing and how long
    it took.  The organizational problems and the arbitrariness
    of writing. The process that fascinated me most was cut and
    paste. Now, we are on delicate ground here because my blood
    boils when I think of what Apple did to those two words.
    For example, my grandmother told me an anecdote about
    Tolstoy. Tolstoy would have his daughters write out a whole
    version in long hand--he would dictate--but two copies.
    One he would cut up, put all over the floor, the other of
    course would be a record of that draft. Then this cut up
    rearrangement, looking at it all together is what most
    writers have done until the era of word processing. That
    is called cut and paste. That is the true meaning of cut
    and paste. The parallel consideration of a large number of
    things and there most appropriate relationship. So the fact
    that some bloody engineer at Xerox Parc or Apple changed
    the meanings of these holy words to mean hide and plug
    outrages me since it is C&B on the Macintosh, cram and bum
    it. This is a wonderful thing about the so called clipboard.
    This is what they call a metaphor. The clipboard on the
    Macintosh is a metaphor for something or other because it
    resembles an ordinary clipboard in every respect except you
    can't see it. Anything that you put on it destroys the
    previous contents. And so you can instantly lose what is
    on it if you are absent minded like me and the phone rings.
    So I say it is just like an ordinary clipboard in every
    other respect except there aren't any. So the fact that
    this asinine metaphor design was coupled with the redefinition
    of two very very important words so that now the public now
    thinks cut and paste is natural to computers. In all of my
    designs from the very beginning, the sacredness of human
    inspiration was the center. My typical user would come
    running in, rushing to the keyboard, no time to open the
    file, turn on the machine, or name anything. You start
    typing, then one thought interrupts and you start typing
    that other thing. And you keep backing up and returning and
    reweaving and every one of these should be stored on disk
    immediately whenever it is finished or put aside and printed
    out immediately whenever it is finished or put aside.  So
    that in the event of total failure of the system, you are
    completely up to date. That was 1962 and 24 years later
    they brought the Macintosh with this abominable hidey-hole
    and they are convincing people that this is the way writing
    systems should work.

The thing about it is, I think he may have a point about the phrase
"cut and paste" having originated before computers (and about it
having a different meaning than the one Apple popularized for it).

   - Logan

 

piece of paper into two

the two major pieces.  The

<snip rant>

Of course "cut and paste" originated way before computers, it is a very old
way to write a ransom note.

 

actually

Of course again. I used to work for a firm called Focus Photoset as a
despatch rider once and when work was slack I used to watch blokes doing
that. The strips of text were composed on Diatype and Electrotype machines
and stuck onto the page together with pictures etc. and the whole thing
photographed in a huge rail-type camera. Fascinating it was. Never saw them
doing any ransom notes though.

Nemo