Jensen Harris - Office 12 Usability team, Microsoft - has two great blog entries about the history and the development of the status bar.
A Brief History of the Status Bar
“…First introduced as a standard OS control as part of the Windows 95 common control library, the status bar has its roots in character mode programs, in which the bottom row of text was reserved space to show information about the program, document, or selection. Commonly, the status bar in character mode programs would tell you which keys to press to perform certain actions.”
“…We came to the conclusion that it did make sense for the Office 12 frame to contain a status bar. There were many “status-like” items that needed a place in the UI–document load information, printing status, long recalculation in Excel, and other background tasks.
There are also a number of add-ins to Office that people have written which expect the status bar. One could have imagined trying to integrate every piece of status into a separate place in the UI (as someone mentioned yesterday, perhaps putting page number in the scrollbar, for instance), but in the end we decided to stick with simplicity and leave a status area at the bottom of the screen.
But at the same time, we knew that these “in-progress” status updates wouldn’t always be up, and we didn’t want the status bar to be just a wasted piece of screen real-estate with just the words “Press F1 for Help” showing most of the time.
So, we started to think of how to use the space in a way that made sense with the rest of the Office 12 design. First, we made the decision to use the right side of the status bar area a place to host view switching, window switching, and zoom control–basically, everything that controls how your window looks. We thought it was consistent to have these “window frame commands” near the scroll bars and it gave us an ideal, standard place to host these controls in a way that increased the usable density of the UI.”
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