Sapphire
More info
- Creator
- Brad Myers
- Released
- 1983
- Type
- Window manager
The window manager for the PERQ workstation under CMU's Accent, written by Brad Myers in 1983 and remembered for its title-bar buttons and for introducing the percent-done progress indicator.
Three Rivers Computer of Pittsburgh built the PERQ in 1980, one of the first commercial graphical workstations, and Carnegie Mellon's Spice project gave it the Accent operating system, the forerunner of Mach. Brad Myers, later a professor at CMU, wrote its window manager. The name is a backronym, Screen Allocation Package Providing Helpful Icons and Rectangular Environments, and it describes the product: overlapping windows with a title bar, small icons in that bar for moving, resizing and closing, and windows that could be shrunk to icons along the bottom of the screen.
Two ideas outlived the machine. Buttons in the title bar, rather than menus, became the norm in Windows and Motif. And the progress indicator: Myers had Sapphire show what percentage of a long operation was done, measured that users found it calming, and published the result in 1985. Every bar that stalls at 99 percent today carries that inheritance.