[hulitu]

> The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time

Just like the hamburger, or the 3 dots menu, or whatever a program manager thinks it shall be the symbol for a menu.

The point is: everything is learned (see discussions about intuitive interfaces in alt.sysadmin.recovery 20 years ago). If you change every couple of months the meaning of a symbol, nobody will know what that symbol means anymore.

[II2II]

To be fair to Microsoft, this was in their help system. They probably wanted to be as clear as possible, to avoid confusing people in an application that was supposed to help people. It is not as though they were removing icons from all applications. It was also a time when companies were exploring how to present GUIs and many people were much more timid about experimenting with computers. Where people today become frustrated with constantly changing interfaces, people then were more likely to fear breaking things.

You are also right about learning things, but also look at it from a different perspective: would a person have even realized that a hamburger menu did something 35 years ago, particularly with today's flat UIs?