Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc.
49 F.3d 807 (1st Cir. 1995) - full text opinion
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.