Interesting oral history of the hamburger menu from the designers of the Xerox Star.
I don’t understand the fascination with the hamburger menu symbol, because it’s not even an icon—it’s just a symbol. Icons had both visual and machine semantics, whereas this menu button had only the former. You don’t do anything with a menu. It just sits there on the screen. You poke at it and a menu pops up, you move the cursor away and the menu goes away. That’s all it does.
If that interests you I highly recommend picking up the history of Xerox PARC in the wonderful book, Dealers of Lighting: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.