A completely different explanation, which I think is the right one:
I always thought the Macintosh menu bar was copied from UCSD Pascal[1], an alternative operating system that ran on Apple II computers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Bill Atkinson was said to be familiar with it.
A machine running UCSD Pascal always had a menu running across the top of the screen, and the contents of the menu changed with the application -- just like the Lisa and the Macintosh -- which came years later. The menu was accessed from the keyboard. UCSD Pascal did not support a mouse, and the Apple II did not have one.
I always thought the Macintosh menu bar was copied from UCSD Pascal[1], an alternative operating system that ran on Apple II computers in the 1970s and early 1980s. Bill Atkinson was said to be familiar with it.
A machine running UCSD Pascal always had a menu running across the top of the screen, and the contents of the menu changed with the application -- just like the Lisa and the Macintosh -- which came years later. The menu was accessed from the keyboard. UCSD Pascal did not support a mouse, and the Apple II did not have one.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal