So your little cheap "dig" on the PC is covering a timeframe of about one year, from 1984 to 1985. And I'm curious how powerful the Mac's clipboard was in that timeframe as well. If you so vividly remember one year back in the early 80's.. Wow.
I'm guessing you're not old enough to have been using computers that long ago, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, Windows 1.0 had an application-neutral clipboard, but it only supported Windows applications, and there
were no Windows applications, not in 1985, not even years later. The programs people used were DOS programs. WordPerfect (which most people used) didn't come to Windows until the 1990s. Word didn't come to Windows until 1989. Same story with Excel or Lotus 1-2-3.
Since most programs were DOS programs, most people ran straight-up DOS without Windows.
Nobody used Windows 1.0. Or 2.0, for that matter.
Meanwhile, all Macintosh applications had support for the system Clipboard from day one.
So, yes, if you're a kid who's reading old copies of
PC Magazine, you might think that, yes, Macs and PCs had the same features at about the same time. But if you were actually out of diapers and
using PCs at that time, you would indeed have been impressed at how powerful the Macintosh clipboard was in 198-whatever.
Just as now, Apple knew how to make money. With a PC you bought Windows to get a shared clipboard. With Apple, you trashed your Apple II and bought a Mac. A couple hundred dollar purchase versus a several thousand dollar one.
If you're a kid who wasn't there, you might think that, based on reading old spec sheets, you could have just bought a copy of Windows 1 off the shelf and magically transformed your PC into a GUI-based, multitasking, clipboard-sharing machine.
If you were an actual computer user in 1985, you would likely have thought Windows was an interesting product, but not very useful. Too slow, no available software. Oh, and you probably didn't own a mouse, either.
Maybe a year or two later, you would have bought a brand new 386, for two or three thousand dollars (PCs were more expensive then) but still kept running DOS, since there were
still no programs for it.
In 1992 or 1992, you would have bitten the bullet, plopped down a couple thousand more dollars, and bought a shiny new 486 with Windows 3.1. Then, you'd have finally gotten your clipboard, and the software to use it with. (Oh, yeah, you'd have had to buy upgrades from the DOS versions, too. And that was several hundred more.)
But I don't expect you to have known that. Anyone who had lived through that time period would know better, but I can see that you didn't.