I don't recollect ever having seen it on any of the 'small screens' (ie LCDs, etc) I used prior to smartphones.
Wait, what?
This might seem like I'm simply being contrarian or wanting stamp my rightitude on the matter, but your framing of the icon's absolute comprehension by everyone else seems to me to be ... ill-advised. Someone not doing their homework might just take your schpiel at face value and propagate problems obliviously.
I've 'beta'd' hamburger icons a few times over the years and have always come away not relying on them precisely because they don't seem to have the blanket comprehension amongst users you seem to think they do.
To me saying that something becomes something over a few decades doesn’t imply that it has been that way from the beginning. It has become a de facto standard over two decades doesn’t mean that it was a de facto standard two decades ago.
I feel like this is really not important, and I’ll change it to the last decade because it doesn’t matter. It’s definitely true that the adoption was most relevant in the last decade. I remember building hamburger menus over 20 years ago though.
What is more important is your second point that I sort of endorse hamburger buttons as a good UI element choice with this introduction. To me, this introduction was not meant to be controversial in any way. I believe that hamburger buttons are one of the most recognisable UI elements, and I don’t think that companies like Apple would use them without doing their homework.
That being said, it was not my intent to promote them as such. I didn’t do any profound research on the topic, and this article is not meant for user interface designers, but for developers that want or need to implement such a button because it either fits their use case or because the designers made the decision.
I’ll amend the intro to be more careful in the wording.
You came in a bit hot with your initial comment, but thanks for your feedback :)
However I misread the thread in my previous post.
PDA's where a CEO/mid-boss/rich guy tools and nothing more, ditto with cell phones until late 90's.
The 99% of the people using software was doing that thru PC's and with a mouse and menu based WIMP interfaces, and not a smartphone based UI.
"Designed and introduced" on the Xerox Star, which almost nobody used. It was quickly forgotten for 30 years, and only came back into use in 2009, according to Wikipedia.
And it's odd because you can emulate W98, W2k, WXP and old GNU/Linux distros with damn ease in order to understand that no wm or desktop environment offerred a hamburger menu. And, trust me, lots of people tried zillions on WM's, tons of FVWM2 setups with bizarre configs highly divergent between themselves and no hamburguer button could be found in any of them.
And I can say the FVWM2 and fluxbox/blackbox guys were pioneers on lots of modern GUI trends and current minimalism or paradigm breaking shifts. If you were an UI designer for sure you tweaked FVWM2 and GTK2/QT3 themes to create weird and crazy things such as a dock composed of minified thumbnails created from windows, later done on Windows' Aero taskbar.
Like this:
https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/
2003:
https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/Nuno_Alexa...
2001:
https://fvwm.sourceforge.net/screenshots/desktops/Tavis_Orma...
Back in the day it wasn't used, period. Any software, either Win32, Motif, Delphi, Athena or such used a menu to access the most common items, the settings and a toolbar for functions. There was no icon replacing all of it.
The same with Macs. Mac OS 8, 9, and then, X. No hamburguer menu. The uberknown Mac menu and a set of Cocoa icons. That it.
It’s used by Microsoft, Apple, Youtube... the list goes on. I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say that it is ubiquitous and familiar to users.
That being said, it's not the point of the article. There are definitely reasons not to use a hamburger button. But this article helps you build one if you want it.