Memes

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

You should check out zip disks. Floppies could only hold 1.5 mb of data, but zip disks started out at 100 mb and ended up being able to hold upwards of 650 mb.

Only the cool kids had those (lol), but they don't get a whole lot of recognition.

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

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.

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

what on earth could that icon even be at this point?

But I like the floppy disk, and I've never used one.

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 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'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."

Kinda like the phone icon (📞) , phones don't look like that anymore

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.

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 reversed 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.

The unix/linux root directories are also good examples, perhaps dating even earlier.