When you CC somebody into an email... what are you actually doing?
It stands for Carbon Copy, an old physical process for copying typed documents. People even used to write CC and BCC on letters.
And when the email was invented they simply kept the same terms:
Carbon paper was invented in 1801 by Pellegrino Turri. It's very simple: a sheet of paper coated with ink and bound in wax.
If you place a sheet of carbon paper between two sheets of blank paper and write on the top one, the writing gets imprinted onto the bottom sheet.
Like most inventions, it took a few decades before the potential of carbon paper was realised; it took off with the rise of the typewriter in the 1870s.
You'd place a sheet of carbon paper behind the sheet onto which you were typing, followed by some blank paper, and... done.
You could even create multiple copies by placing several different layers of carbon paper and blank paper together, perhaps five or six at a time.
Unsurprisingly, these came to be known as "carbon copies."
Of course, this manual system could lead to some rather funny (or infuriating) mistakes.
As when somebody forgot to change out the sheets of paper behind... and ended up writing another carbon copy over the top.
This is how copies of letters, whether handwritten or typed, were made for over a century.
It allowed you to send the same letter to different people without retyping them, or to keep copies of letters and other correspondence or documentation.
It became common to include the abbreviation "CC" in letters, followed by the names of the people who were supposed to receive a copy of the letter.
Or "Blind Carbon Copy" aka BCC, when the recipients weren't to know it was a copy circulated to other people.
With the invention of the photocopier and its rise to widespread usage in the 1980s carbon paper slowly fell out of use.
Then came the internet and email, which has led to the decline of paper correspondence full stop.
But CC and BCC? They've endured...
When the email was invented it made sense to include a "CC" and "BCC" feature - we still use them today, after all, because they're very helpful features.
Back then everybody knew what those abbreviations stood for, and so by including them designers didn't have to explain the function.
But now? Many people who CC or BCC emails don't even know what the letters stand for, never mind what the process was actually like.
Not that it matters, of course, because knowing it doesn't change anything. Still, it does remind us how pervasively the past shapes the present.
And it's only an innocuous example... in how many more powerful ways does history, even invisibly, shape the present day?