I’m too young for floppies, never used em
I will however be personally offended if they change the universal save icon
The best part about them was the sound. Like, you knew your machine was doing something when it was writing to a floppy, there was that mechanical sound.
For your listening pleasure: https://youtu.be/ZnFQZa8SKP8
There was this guy who made music using floppies and other old stuff. Pretty cool.
Edit: I think I meant this other guy, but the first one’s good too.
Wow that Floppotron is something else! 8bit Symphonic orchestra vibes.
I love these kinds of whacky music machines, I’m sure you’ve seen this one before: https://youtu.be/IvUU8joBb1Q
I’ve seen it! these rube-golberg music things are really cool
If you want some really wild old storage tech, a normal VHS cassette could hold 3-5gb of data. But we didn’t have any use for that much storage at the time, and CDs were taking over by the time we did, so nobody bought the VHS storage hardware.
Click.
…
Click
…
Click
My dad was a cool kid, who would have thought?
Those were floppies, too! The storage medium was a flexible magnetic film, same as floppies and unlike the rigid platters found in hard disk drives.
SyQuest competed with the ZIP drive with its EZ Drive, which used a lone hard-disk platter in a removable plastic cartridge as its storage medium.
Both drives suffered from various mechanical problems, high cost of storage media, and low storage capacity, and were ultimately outcompeted by optical discs, which have in turn been replaced by USB flash memory cards (although optical discs are still useful when you need to receive some bytes from someone you don’t trust not to destroy your computer).
I remember when physical save buttons were a thing
As in the “record” button on a tape deck?
I just meant floppies ;)
I think I’ve heard that Microsoft is replacing it though unfortunately (but I don’t have a source, so take it with a grain of salt)
I also talked to a design student who said that the whole design community hated the current save icon, so we might be doomed to a new meaningless minimalistic icon.
Replace it with what? Nothing has that recognizability. Though professional software like photoshop and vscode kinda solve it by just placing it under file > save as with no icon. Ppl who use that generally know how to ctrl-s
In LibreOffice, the save icon for a while has been a colored arrow pointing down on top of a page icon. Arrow color changes based on if there are unsaved changes in the doc.
Personally, the save icon will forever be a 3.5" floppy in my mind.
So it’s a download icon.
Design people and looking for ways to mess with perfectly fine stuff while pretending to innovate, how surprising.
Don’t get me wrong, a good (UX) designer is always a godsend, but the amount of mediocre ones reinventing the wheel is staggering.
Reinventing the floppy disk
You’re just jelous of their genius. Look at these design guidlines from the elementary os team. I mean what else can this window blind with an arrow mean?
/s
Are you trying to tell me that’s not a trash can?
Looks like a paper shredder to me.
Finally a button to lower my projection screen!
Washing machine
Paper towel dispenser
But I like the floppy disk, and I’ve never used one.
I did, all of the first games I played came on floppy disks. We had big boxes with like 100 floppy disks that we would bring over to friends to let them play our games. With no internet and no mobile phone games, you can maybe imagine the feeling of having someone bring over tons of new games you never tried before. It was a really nice feeling that is a bit lost now since there are so many games everywhere.
I have the game Drakkhen on 5.25 inch floppy disks. I wonder if they still work? I have nothing to read them with.
what on earth could that icon even be at this point?
The same thing as every “design” minimalistic icon.
A cryptic symbol with no direct meaning I am afraidA cryptic symbol with no direct meaning I am afraid
Isn’t that effectively what the floppy disk is to most computer users today?
Not exactly. It can be confusing at first, but then you see that it’s a standard in most apps, and you’re fine. The most curious ones will look for more info and find the historical roots.
In other words, the floppy disk has meaning, just like most proverbs that come from ancient roots, but are still used and understood everywhere.
Well yeah, but not all computer users today.
An arrow pointing into a box, like the download icon. That’s all I can really think of…
But what if the software has both options, to save and to download?
A vault or filing cabinet.🗄 Or, every file can track all the state-changes with every keytype or click and update the permanent file whenever there’s a pause in activity.
I was looking for 1 in my old pc junk boxes, to show my 12 year old what they looked like. Not a single floppy survived.
I don’t think thats true about the design community hating it. I think a lot of designers have a general fondness for it. I’ve been in Product Design for years and have rarely heard anyone hating on it.
I’m glad to hear that
The bomb icon hasn’t changed in 300 years, so maybe?
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It’s is already hard because it’s 5,25 inch and not a floppy but good job…
Lol, this never even occured to me. I guess I just got used to it.
I’ll never forget my nephew asking me why I have a box of save icons.
Made me feel really old explaining it to him, but he took it in stride and we talked about older tech and the stuff it entailed.
Him and his sister were also surprised about the phone icon and why it’s referred to as, “the phone is ringing”.
Those two love to learn new things about old things and how things work.
The magic in their eyes as I touched on the idea of looking for things in the world that were designed and not natural was amazing.
“Look around and see everything that is made was designed by people. The building we’re standing next to was designed down to the nails and the ground it sits on. The foundation and the layers that were built up to ensure that the building doesn’t move were all the work of generations of progress of people working together.”
“Even the gravel?”
“Even the gravel was chosen from the work of many people for the correct size and type of stone to be suitable for placing a house on.”
I think more people should be like you. Compassionate to the younger generations.
More people really should be willing to be compassionate to younger generations
Ignite their passion in the world and inspire them to take up the reigns of the future
If I can inspire them to be their best selves and to inspire others then I’ll consider that a win
next tell them why we call it dialing
NGL I kinda miss having a rotary phone, it made every phone call deliberate.
I don’t miss not having Caller ID though. I am happy it doesn’t cost extra to have it anymore.
Aww! I had a similar thing with my new 10 year old nephew when he was about 5 and I showed him a cassette. I told him you can put music on it. I’ve got a video of him turning it over and over, asking, “How do you get music from this? It’s a total mystery.”
He and his siblings love old stuff. I’ve got them into the old 80s and 90s kid’s shows and the old games like Piranha and Commander Keen on DOSbox.
(My oldest nephew is 20 now, and when I showed him my floppy disks he did indeed refer to them as
“the save icon”.)You should show them the anime Dr. Stone. It’s kinda goofy but it also goes through science over the ages.
Did it happen for real? I always though that it was just a meme.
Kinda like the phone icon (📞) , phones don’t look like that anymore
Caduceus is a symbol from 3000 BC and it’s still often used as a pharmacy logo despite not many people knowing what those snakes are supposed to mean.
That’s a good point, the Rod of Asclepius (⚕️) and the Recipe symbol (℞) (meaning take) are both pretty ancient and still recognized.
The Rod of Asclepius is part of the Star of Life ( wikipedia ) which is a current international first-aid station symbol since the Red Cross has become too stingy with its trademark (they frown on the Red Cross in games and toys even though they’re teaching implements)
And yes, the Rod of Asclepius is commonly confused with the Hermetic Caduceus even in official medical graphics. Much like the four-leaf clover appears in seasonal St. Patricks Day merch.
I don’t know though, don’t most kids still have one of those Fisher Price phones?
Yeah, but at least I actually recognized that as a phone. The floppy disk thing has always been more of a what the hell is that kinda thing.
Wow, it hadn’t even crossed my mind that people ALREADY might not recognize it.
And the symbol for video is a film strip. I guess we could change the symbols for everything into little pictures of hard drives, but that seems counterintuitive.
Exactly. Hard drives will also be obselete in the not too distant future, and a picture of a nand chip isn’t the most descriptive. I think we should keep the film strip, since that’s how film began, and these reels of film can only be used for video so you know what the icon means even if you have never seen the icon before.
Snakes have been associated with medicine since the Greek myth of Asclepius, and we use it in modern hospitals today, so I don’t think the floppy disk save icon will need to change.
That raises a mildly interesting point.
It used to be that different kinds of information were stored on very different media: paper for text, canvas for paintings, film strips for photographs and video, tape and vinyl records for audio, floppy disks for computer files, and so on. That’s where the icons come from.
On the other hand, now that high-capacity hard disks and flash memory exist, many different kinds of information can be and often are stored on the same device. You can’t easily tell what kind of information is stored on it just by looking at it; you have to actually read it.
and that IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!
I dunno why, I like how floppy disks look
I’d be perfectly fine with floppy disks still if they had been able to remotely keep up with CD-DVD in speed and size.
But also isn’t Modern Computing basically built upon an entire foundation of 30+ year old structures? I mean not just the Floppy Icon but on Windows A:\ is a reserved letter for the Floppy Drive, and that was a legacy from DOS.
The unix/linux root directories are also good examples, perhaps dating even earlier.
Also, you cannot create a file named “con” in Windows, even in the latest versions. It’s a holdover from DOS where that word was reserved for the console. For example, you could type “copy con file.txt” to quickly create a text file from the command line and start entering text.
There’s another interesting fact here: MS-DOS 1.0 didn’t have directories… To print a text file, you could just do
TYPE foo.txt > LPT1, sinceLPT1wasn’t in a directory (like/devon Linux).MS-DOS 2.0 added directories. However, to remain backwards compatible with 1.0, devices were still “global”. You could still run
TYPE foo.txt > LPT1regardless of which directory you were in.This is why you can’t create files names CON, LPT1, etc. in Windows. They’re reserved globally, which is a holdover from the original MS-DOS version from 1983.
You actually can, if you bypass some translation.
\\?\C:\CONis a perfectly valid file path…and creating a file at that path will prevent almost all software from opening it! You can see it in File Explorer, but you can’t delete it without a command prompt.
Drive letters in general are a legacy holdover from MS-DOS. The Windows NT kernel doesn’t use them. It is a user-space DLL that maps the kernel’s single tree into drive letters.
All other operating systems use a single tree with mount points instead. Windows supports mount points as well, but its default behavior is to assign a drive letter.
Drive letters are still useful, though, if you have multiple drives and
- they’re removable drives (optical disc drives, USB drives, etc), or
- they’re internal, but you want to keep them separate (i.e. not RAID).
Other platforms deal with this by reserving a subtree for mount points (
/mediaon Linux,/Volumeson macOS), which is functionally equivalent to drive letters. This does have the advantage that mounted volumes are identified by a name rather than just a single letter, but on the other hand, the path to the mounted volume is longer and less convenient to type.
This thought comforts me.
It’s an accessibility thing. Time travelers are covered under the ADA. Once a symbol reaches ubiquity, it can never be changed! Back in my day about 100k years ago, before I touched a mysterious stone in Scotland and found myself in the 21st century, we put an old sandal in front of the cave entrance if we needed privacy! Now it is a sock on a doorknob! 100k years from know, people will still be marking entrances with footwear for privacy.
I’m saving this post with a non floppy disk save button.
Isn’t that send
On jerboa, the save button looks like a bookmark button. On the web ui it’s a star.
Cant wait to drop the floppy disk knowledge on the future grandkids
Looks like bots have made it to lemmy lol
Now it really feels like the old homeland
I mean, at least the first sentence is true, since we will have destroyed ourselves by then.
Now do podcasts
