Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland International, Inc.
49 F.3d 807 (1st Cir. 1995), aff’d by an equally divided court, 516 U.S. 233 (1996)
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The case focused on the copyrightability of menu command hierarchies. However, neither Lotus 1-2-3, released in 1983, nor Quattro, released in 1988, were the first programs to use pull-down menus. That honor belongs to the experimental Macintosh operating system known as Lisa. You can view the progression of Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI) here. Note that pull down menus were added in August 1980. Information on other historical computer GUIs is also available.