ClipBook Viewer

~ the last words ~

Most people who used Windows between 1992 and 2007 believed the clipboard held exactly one thing and forgot it the moment you copied the next one. That was true of the clipboard itself, and Windows shipped a whole application on top of it anyway: ClipBook Viewer, an MDI program with two child windows, one showing what was on the clipboard right now and the other showing a book of clippings you had chosen to keep.

You could paste something and give it a name, and it became a page in your local ClipBook. Pages stayed there after a reboot. And then the part that reads like science fiction if you only ever met Windows after Vista: you could share a page, and other machines on the network could open your ClipBook by name and paste out of it. Each page carried an access control list saying who could see it and who could change it.

It arrived in Windows for Workgroups 3.1 in October 1992, which is exactly where you would expect it, since Workgroups was the release where Microsoft bolted peer-to-peer networking onto Windows and then went looking for things to do with it. It survived into the NT line and stayed there all the way to Windows XP.

~ the record ~

~ the thing underneath it ~

ClipBook sharing ran on NetDDE, the networked version of Dynamic Data Exchange, which was Microsoft's early-nineties answer to applications talking to each other. DDE was already creaky by 1995 and NetDDE was DDE with a network stack under it, which meant a Windows service listening for other people's requests to poke at data on your machine.

That is a sentence that ages badly. By the early 2000s NetDDE was a named attack surface with a couple of published remote-code holes against it, and the number of organizations actually passing clippings around by ClipBook page had rounded to nothing. Windows XP Service Pack 2 shipped on 25 August 2004 and set both the Network DDE service and the ClipBook service to Disabled on every edition. The application stayed in the box. The feature that made it interesting did not come back on.

~ how you found it ~

Windows 95 and 98 carried a reduced version under the name Clipboard Viewer, which could show you the clipboard and save it to a file but had none of the network side. By Windows XP, ClipBook Viewer was no longer listed in the Start menu at all. It was still installed and still worked locally, reachable only if you knew to type clipbrd.exe into the Run box.

I was on Windows 98 from the tail of the dial-up years and then XP through university, and I never opened it once, which is roughly how the program ended its life everywhere else too. Present on a hundred million machines and deliberately unlisted on all of them.

~ the long silence ~

Vista shipped on 30 January 2007 with NetDDE gone from the operating system, and ClipBook Viewer went with it. Nothing replaced it. For the next eleven years Windows had a clipboard that held one item and told you nothing about it, and the market for third-party clipboard managers, which had been a curiosity, turned into a permanent little industry.

Microsoft brought back half of it in the Windows 10 October 2018 update as Clipboard History, a panel of the last few things you copied, pinnable and optionally synced to your own other machines through your Microsoft account. The other half, the part where a clipboard page was a shared object on a LAN with permissions attached, never came back and nobody has asked for it.

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