My response to the comments in Cut and Paste Files & Folders in Mac OS X got a bit took long. So here is it in an article:
Indeed. CUA. The days (:
I’ll write more about CUA in the future (there is some CUA site:wiert.me stuff from the past) as it defines a lot of modern UI and user experience.
In fact the history of Ctrl-C and Command-C goes back until before System 1 (the OS for the first Macintosh) which indeed had the Open Apple Key shortcuts, but didn’t introduce them.
The Command Key was introduced in the Apple III and became more popular in the Apple //e and //c (I own both) where AppleWorks was already using these shortcuts in 1986.
It is funny to notice that Apple keyboards lost their logo keys but Windows keyboards gained them.
Some Apple keyboard pr0n can be found on Wikipedia.
–jeroen