taskbar
Sign in to saveAlso known as task bar, screenbar, screen bar, Dock (computing)
The taskbar is a graphical user interface element that has been part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95, displaying and facilitating switching between running programs. The taskbar and the associated Start Menu were created and named in 1993 by Daniel Oran, a program manager at Microsoft who had previously collaborated on great ape language research with the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard.
~22 min read
Article
14 sectionsContents
- Antecedents
- Windows 1.0
- Arthur
- Amiga
- Microsoft Windows
- Taskbar elements
- Customization
- Desktop toolbars
- macOS
- Unix-like operating systems
- KDE Plasma
- GNOME
- Other Unix environments
- References
The taskbar is a graphical user interface element that has been part of Microsoft Windows since Windows 95, displaying and facilitating switching between running programs. The taskbar and the associated Start Menu were created and named in 1993 by Daniel Oran, a program manager at Microsoft who had previously collaborated on great ape language research with the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard.
The taskbar is an exemplar of a category of always-visible graphical user interface elements that provide access to fundamental operating system functions and information. At the time of its introduction in 1995, the taskbar was unique among such elements because it provided the user with a means of switching between running programs through a single click of the pointing device.