Taking a Leisurely Scroll: A Brief History of Scroll Bars

Taking a Leisurely Scroll: A Brief History of Scroll Bars

A basic function of any operating system is the capacity to scroll through the contents of self-enclosed windows displayed on a screen so that the ability to see all of the contents of a file folder is not dependent on whether the window encompassing it is large enough to display all of it simultaneously. The main method of allowing one's view of a window's contents to be shifted is a scrolling bar that is aligned along one of the faces of the frame, and the aesthetic design and functional usability of these bars have been refined over the course of the long history of personal computers.

A website named infomesh.org documents and recreates features of old versions of operating systems and the Internet, and the way scrolling bars appeared on computers sold as early as 1981 are showcased in one interactive feature on the site. Users can click on recreations of scrolling bars to get a feel for how their convenience of use improved over time and the order in which their aesthetic styles codified new trends.

What many find particularly striking about the earliest scroll bars is how difficult it is to reposition the slider; during the dragging motion, the slider would effectively stay in place until the user let go of the mouse button so that the slider would instantly relocate to the cursor's position. Nowadays, one can drag the cursor down the length of the bar to have the slider smoothly move in tandem with the cursor and adjust the contents of the window accordingly. The Windows line of operating systems had only incorporated this innovation into the Windows 95 release roughly six years after it was prominently used in the NeXTSTEP OS.

Windows 95 had also adopted NeXSTEP's procedure of dynamically adjusting the size of the slider to be proportional to how much of the window's total content the window's screen area covers, whereas most of the operating systems in between had kept the sliders uniformly small regardless of these circumstances. The Mac line only adopted this trend with the Mac OS X 10.0 in 2001. For more information click here https://scrollbars.matoseb.com/.