I'm too young for floppies, never used em
I will however be personally offended if they change the universal save icon
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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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
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.
Click.
...
Click
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Click
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.
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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
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 afraid
A 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.
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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?
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I don't think thats true about the design community hating it. I think a lot of designers have a general fondness for it. Iโve been in Product Design for years and have rarely heard anyone hating on it.
I'm glad to hear that
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.
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.
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and that IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!
This thought comforts me.
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."
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.
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
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Kinda like the phone icon (๐) , 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.
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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 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.
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Cant wait to drop the floppy disk knowledge on the future grandkids
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