[Article author here] No. The Apple menu wasn't originally hierarchical, it was flat in the first 6 major version of classic MacOS; and it wasn't originally a

[Article author here] No. The Apple menu wasn't originally hierarchical, it was flat in the first 6 major version of classic MacOS; and it wasn't originally an app launcher. It held the control panel and things but no launchers. It became customisable in MacOS 7, which introduced aliases (symlinks in xNix terms, shortcuts in Win9x terms). Then you could put aliases in the "Apple menu" folder inside the System folder, and make it into an app-launch menu, but that was not its purpose and MacOS did not ship with it configured like that. Whereas the Start menu was always hierarchical, and was always an app-launch menu; in Win95 it did little else.