Why are spinners called spinners? [closed]

Question

In Android development, one of the commonly used tools is a spinner. This is a menu, rather like the select tag in HTML. Why are they called spinners? I would personally give that name to indefinite progress bars, because they spin. However, these are just called progressbars. Why are spinners called spinners?

EDIT: Thanks laalto for the answer saying that the name came from other GUIs. Where did it come from at first? Why did the first GUI designer to make one call it a spinner?

EDIT: Some more research has revealed the following information: the name "spinner" comes from "spinbox", which is a UI control used for entering numbers. The name "spinbox" comes from the user's ability to use a wheelmouse to scroll the numbers up and down. laalto's answer is pretty good, and looks like the only answer I'm going to get, so I'll accept it.

Answer 1

The name comes from other graphical user interfaces. It's better if new names for old things are not invented but familiar names are used instead. The menu-like implementation in Android spinners came only later. The widget has evolved a lot since its numeric updown origins but the old name has stuck.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinner_(computing)

The confusion with progress bar is commonplace. Often customers and other stakeholders speak about spinners when referring to progress bars and one has to be careful to not get the wrong idea. Also the Wikipedia article linked above addresses the confusion up front:

This article is about spinboxes used for entering numerical information. For spinning indicators of activity, see Throbber.