How Apple Borrowed iOS’s Hamburger Icon From Xerox PARC

By

Screen Shot 2014-03-30 at 6.18.07 PM

It’s no secret that Steve Jobs was inspired by the incredible work Xerox was doing over at PARC Labs when he came up with the Mac: he borrowed the computer mouse, the desktop, and even the Macintosh business plan from the famous tech think tank.

Now, it looks like we also owe the ubiquitous hamburger icon — widely used in iOS as a menu shortcut, as well as a way to order draggable lists — to Xerox PARC as well. It turns out that the first example of the hamburger icon shows up in a 1981 video for the Xerox Star workstation.

According to designer Norm Cox:

I designed that symbol many years ago as a “container” for contextual menu choices. It would be somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button.

Its graphic design was meant to be very “road sign” simple, functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. With so few pixels to work with, it had to be very distinct, yet simple. I think we only had 16×16 pixels to render the image. (or possibly 13×13… can’t remember exactly).

Interesting inside joke… we used to tell potential users that the image was an “air vent” to keep the window cool. It usually got a chuckle, and made the mark much more memorable.

One of these days, mark my words, we’re going to find out that Xerox had a working smartwatch in production in their PARC labs.

Source: Evernote

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.