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Element 10

10●›
S
Scroll

Move the window over more than fits.

wheel · fling · scrollbar

First known

Opened

1963Sketchpad: four black knobs pan the view over a drawing larger than the scope. Sutherland, TX-2.

See also: Scroll bars in Smalltalk and Interlisp, by 1974.

SAGE consoles' off-centering may be earlier; no document found.

Someone opened the dated document itself. The source.

  • ReadingValue

Specimen № 10a — operate freely

Scroll both strips. Only one lets you stop between floors.

Fig. 10a — Segmented Scroll

000 readings · idle

Anatomy of Segmented Scroll

  1. 01Grab
    You
    Starts a scroll with a finger, a wheel, or a trackpad.
    It
    Follows freely, for now.
  2. 02Pull
    You
    Carries the surface past the midpoint between two states.
    It
    Resists a little, and previews the next state at the edge.
  3. 03Release
    You
    Lets go, at some speed.
    It
    Picks a detent: the nearest one, or the next one if the throw was fast.
  4. 04Settle
    You
    Watches it land.
    It
    Comes to rest on exactly one state. There is no in-between.

Phases light as the specimen above registers them. The dark ones are the ones it can't sense.

Lineage

Paged readers and slot-machine pickers are older than software. The iPhone's picker wheel, in 2007, made quantized scrolling a gesture, and CSS scroll snapping later gave it to every page.

Descends from
Segmented Scroll
Gave rise to

Under delegation

Survives

  1. Survives
  2. Mutates
  3. Dissolves

Quantized position is how people already steer models: pages of drafts you flip through one at a time, a set of options you can't land between. Regenerate is a segmented scroll through possibility space, and each detent is a whole answer. What's missing is the free strip beside it: a way to move continuously between two answers instead of only jumping.

Becomes

Down the Look column

  1. it reactsGlGlance
  2. it followsSScroll
  3. it targetsHvHover
  4. it remembersZZoom
  5. it connectsBBrowse
  6. it guessesGaGaze
  7. it actsInInspect

Read down and Glance gets heavier: each step is the same act, on a machine that keeps track of more.

Bodies

The act stays put while the hardware changes. These are some of the forms Scroll takes.

  • wheel
  • fling
  • scrollbar

From the 2021 table

These were tiles of their own. On this table each is a form of Scroll, and each old address lands here.

  • Scroll FlingAllotropeThe same act with another response curve.Operate ↑
  • Segmented ScrollAllotropeThe same act with another response curve.Operate ↑
  • Smooth ScrollAllotropeThe same act with another response curve.Operate ↑
  • StretchAllotropeThe same act with another response curve.Operate ↑