Talk:Scroll

Origins of VDU scrolling

When did people first apply scrolling to VDU ? TTYs could be said to scroll automatically. I wonder if people just applied it to glass terminals just like that, or what? If anyone can find some background on when it was invented, that would be good. Kim Bruning 11:14, 3 May 2004 (UTC)

A very interesting question of tech history. Here's a tidbit I found on Google Answers (see the next-to-last entry), but I'm quite sure scrolling were done on terminals before that. --Wernher 00:08, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Ouch, that Google Answer is so wrong , it hurts. :-/ . I wish it was a wiki, so it could be fixed. The second to last answer mentions a 6502 based system supporting smooth scrolling. That's nice, but I do believe the 6502 post-dates the invention of the glass terminal by a bit :) . (other things that are wrong: The first (graphical) web browser was called WWW, was written by Tim Berners-Lee, and probably the reason web pages are scrolled is I doubt he really decided, he probably just grabbed the relevant widgets in the NeXTSTEP API. The ancestory of that can probably be traced back through NeXT and Xerox usability testing. :-/ )

Okay, just to prove to myself I'm not insane, here's some screenshots of the worlds' first web-browser (from http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html )

• http://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap2_24c.gif
• http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/tims_editor

Note how the original WWW was closer in concept to current day wikis than later developments.

w3c's Amaya still has much of the abilities of the original WWW programme. I'm not certain if it's literally derived.

Hmph, well so much for that rant. But it doesn't bring us that much closer to the real answer I think. :-( Kim Bruning 21:37, 4 May 2004 (UTC)