Sim
Well-known member
I find it rather amusing that we still use a floppy disk icon to indicate saving.
XF 2.1:
XF 1.5:
Does anyone under the age of about 20 actually know what a floppy disk even is?
My wife found a box of old floppy disks in the bottom drawer of her desk last week - my kids didn't know what they were.
I still recall the information pack I got sent by our state education department about computers when I did a school project on computers in 1983 (year 6). It included some magnetic data storage tape, an 8" floppy disk, but also a set of punch cards and instructions on how to mark those punch cards so that I could send them in to the computing centre where they would print out a calendar for me using ASCII art. That was a great project (I got an A+
)
Anyway, having lived through the floppy disk era and even done tech-support jobs where our staff would complain that the magnetic door opening key they had to use would wipe the floppy disk their work they took home from the office was stored on because they put them both in the same pocket - I'm very glad we no longer rely on such fragile technology and would personally be more than happy to see it disappear from our iconography.
Unfortunately, I don't really have a better suggestion for what to use at this point. The whole concept of "saving" is almost moot these days anyway - since many cloud based services just take care of updates (and versioning) for you.
Interestingly, there is another debate entirely about whether services like Google Docs, which take care of everything for you, will lead to a generation of computer users who don't understand that you need to explicitly "save" activity in other applications - thus making them more likely to lose data? I know my kids do everything in Google Docs at school so don't necessarily understand the importance of saving your work when working in other applications!
Anyway, here is some other discussion about the floppy disk iconography for further reading:
... just something to think about
XF 2.1:
XF 1.5:
Does anyone under the age of about 20 actually know what a floppy disk even is?
My wife found a box of old floppy disks in the bottom drawer of her desk last week - my kids didn't know what they were.
I still recall the information pack I got sent by our state education department about computers when I did a school project on computers in 1983 (year 6). It included some magnetic data storage tape, an 8" floppy disk, but also a set of punch cards and instructions on how to mark those punch cards so that I could send them in to the computing centre where they would print out a calendar for me using ASCII art. That was a great project (I got an A+
)Anyway, having lived through the floppy disk era and even done tech-support jobs where our staff would complain that the magnetic door opening key they had to use would wipe the floppy disk their work they took home from the office was stored on because they put them both in the same pocket - I'm very glad we no longer rely on such fragile technology and would personally be more than happy to see it disappear from our iconography.
Unfortunately, I don't really have a better suggestion for what to use at this point. The whole concept of "saving" is almost moot these days anyway - since many cloud based services just take care of updates (and versioning) for you.
Interestingly, there is another debate entirely about whether services like Google Docs, which take care of everything for you, will lead to a generation of computer users who don't understand that you need to explicitly "save" activity in other applications - thus making them more likely to lose data? I know my kids do everything in Google Docs at school so don't necessarily understand the importance of saving your work when working in other applications!
Anyway, here is some other discussion about the floppy disk iconography for further reading:
- https://adage.com/article/opinion/ux-design-why-microsofts-save-icon-still-floppy-disk/2192431
- https://www.npr.org/2012/11/01/164129889/when-a-floppy-disc-icon-no-longer-signals-save
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon-still-a-floppy-disk
... just something to think about
Unfortunately from those days I developed a heavy hitting typing method that continues to today leading me to absolutely hate chiclet style keyboards.
