Where the hamburger menu came from

Those three stacked lines have a birthday and a parent. Designer Norm Cox drew them in 1981 for the Xerox Star — one of the first computers with a graphical interface — as an icon for a menu. His own description was gloriously literal: the lines were meant to resemble the list of items they’d reveal, “a road sign for a list.” Cheap to draw at low resolution, unmistakable in a tiny space.

The Star itself flopped commercially and disappeared. The glyph waited in obscurity for three decades, then small phone screens made every pixel precious again — and suddenly a symbol that says “there’s a list behind me” in almost no space was exactly what the whole industry needed. It got the nickname “hamburger” from the obvious resemblance: two buns, a patty.

So a 1981 icon for a machine almost nobody bought now sits in the corner of a device almost everybody carries.

The object died. The metaphor didn’t.