4 ms·

Yes it's amusing but the floppy disk metaphor is about three technological phases out of date. It's as if a magneto crank were offered to represent "call." I

Yes it's amusing but the floppy disk metaphor is about three technological phases out of date. It's as if a magneto crank were offered to represent "call." I point that out to ask this: why hasn't a better, more general icon representing the concept of persisting something emerged? I've seen many attempts (various arrows with lines and whatnot,) but they don't stand alone very well. Certainly not as well as a crummy old floppy disk icon (at least for those that know what they looked like.) It's as if as soon as we began using something we couldn't detach and hold in hand we ceased being able to represent what was happening.

adolph 6y ago
Iconography can work outside the context in which it arose when it is sufficiently ubiquitous and new users learn it as an abstract shape instead of a nmemonic for the physical world. I think that the 3.5 diskette will have staying power since the trend in applications is to constantly persist. The icons needed have shifted to SCM-like commit, branch, fork, diff, merge, revert. However, these are conceptually very abstract compared to "Save."
- topspin 6y ago
  "Iconography can work outside the context..." Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that it is unworkable or a detriment to the function of some system. Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why? There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. There have been flash devices and cloud services and other stuff since. Yet, for some possibly interesting reason we got stuck on disks, and floppy disks in particular.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Floppies were what everyone used to store things at the same time that GUIs were coming into wide adoption, so the first save icons were floppies. And then they never updated the icon. Floppies were a thing from like 1970-2000. That's 30 years! No wonder the icon is still around.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    3.5" disks is what most people had on their work and home computers since early 1990s if not late 1980s. 5.25" floppy disks became rare after, say, 1995. I suppose nobody had punched tape on their home or office computers, it was in the realm of programmers and operators. The disks are mechanical devices, so their shape is dictated by function and thus was uniform. E.g. USB flash drives do not have such consistency. What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it. Interesting example. It's worth pointing out here that most characters are not composed entirely of meaning-indicating components; there is e.g. a whole series of compounds of 青 which use it solely to indicate the pronunciation of the compound, not to claim that invitations (请) are somehow metaphysically green (青). But 保 is an exception! Going by wiktionary, it originates as a compound of 人 and 子, both used for the meaning -- protecting is what people do with babies. (Interestingly, the character 仔 exists independently today.) Evolution of the component on the right into 呆 was purely based on shape, and transformed the original meaningful component into something completely arbitrary -- there was no point at which 口 and 木 (as separate from 呆) were conceptually part of the character. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BF%9D https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BF%9D https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E4%BF%9D https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E4%BF%9D
      - nine_k 6y ago
        This is wonderfully apt then! The 2.5" diskette is all envelope and protective curtain, completely concealing the actual disk. (Unlike CD / DVD which are emphatically disk-shaped.)
      - adolph 6y ago
        Thank you for bringing up “口”. I was trying to find a reference of Apple using that as inspiration for the iPhone home button. Maybe the story is apocryphal?
  - Angostura 6y ago
    > Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why? > There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. The floppy was the ubiquitous removable storage medium for the first microcomputers with GUIs.
  - adolph 6y ago
    My theory would start with shape distinctiveness. While some of the Microsoft iconography uses a vertical rectangle for phone (in the context of adding apps), the blob-ended wide U of the old fashioned telephone handset is still the predominate icon for a telephone. The follow on technologies were much simpler in form and thus make for shapes that are indistinguishable from any other box. An icon needs a high level of distinctiveness to be successful. Likewise, the follow on technologies to small portable storage did not have distinctive and ubiquitous shapes. Maybe a long rectangle with a short end against a square would represent a flash drive? I think that a sibling comment about the 3.5” diskette being present at the birth of GUIs must be part of the answer too since the world didn’t immediately transition to flash drives and other media. All lived together for quite a while. Looking at “floppy icon” search results leads me to believe that many icon designers have never seen an actual 3.5” diskette. On many the shutter is too wide and could not slide open, on others the rotor mating surface is classic iPod low.
Etheryte 6y ago
The main benefit here is not in how accurate the metaphor is today, but how consistently it is used. Save looked roughly the same in the 90s as it does today, across operating systems, across applications, and it's instantly recognizable. Perhaps what's a good comparison is traffic signs: no entry has very little metaphorical meaning but it's universally known and understood.
bluedevil2k 6y ago
I’ve started using the cloud icon with an arrow for save (fa-cloud-upload), implying “this information is being uploaded to the cloud”. No complaints.
Izkata 6y ago
> but the floppy disk metaphor is about three technological phases out of date. It's as if a magneto crank were offered to represent "call." The phone icon used everywhere depicts a corded type (without the cord) that was last popular in the 90s. After that there was a wireless version, then flip-phones, then smartphones. So actually about the same number of iterations out of date.
- a_e_k 6y ago
  Likewise, the typical alarm clock icon depicting an analogue clock with physical bells on top is also laughably out of date. But it's recognizable!
usrusr 6y ago
> why hasn't a better, more general icon representing the concept of persisting something emerged? Icons are good at representing objects but terrible at representing behavior over time unless it's simple directional movement. How would you symbolize something like the concept of persistence? "Data that can be retrieved unchanged in the future"? A pen, a clock with progression arrows on the hands, and reading glasses? Surely not if there's already an established convention available. The floppy disk happens to be that convention, as the last object that was unambiguously connected to local storage (an optical disk would be ambiguous for recorded music consumption, HDD were supposed to be invisible to the regular user and USB sticks could just as well be any of a variety of radio interfaces in the same form factor). So floppy disk it is. And it's not a problem at all that the convention, once established, is now used by generations that have never seen a floppy, it's just visual language to them. Complaining about the lack of connect between that language and the life realities of it's users seems to me as pointless as complaining that the word dog does not sound like barking at all (why not whoofwhoof?) or that the word hammer does not sound like the noise of hammering (why not banger?). And still, the floppy disk icon is in decline, because applications that eschew local storage tend to use the "arrow up to cloud" icon. Another convention that has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually going on (few datacenters are actually hidden in clouds)

adolph 6y ago

Iconography can work outside the context in which it arose when it is sufficiently ubiquitous and new users learn it as an abstract shape instead of a nmemonic for the physical world. I think that the 3.5 diskette will have staying power since the trend in applications is to constantly persist. The icons needed have shifted to SCM-like commit, branch, fork, diff, merge, revert. However, these are conceptually very abstract compared to "Save."

topspin 6y ago
"Iconography can work outside the context..." Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that it is unworkable or a detriment to the function of some system. Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why? There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. There have been flash devices and cloud services and other stuff since. Yet, for some possibly interesting reason we got stuck on disks, and floppy disks in particular.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Floppies were what everyone used to store things at the same time that GUIs were coming into wide adoption, so the first save icons were floppies. And then they never updated the icon. Floppies were a thing from like 1970-2000. That's 30 years! No wonder the icon is still around.
- nine_k 6y ago
  3.5" disks is what most people had on their work and home computers since early 1990s if not late 1980s. 5.25" floppy disks became rare after, say, 1995. I suppose nobody had punched tape on their home or office computers, it was in the realm of programmers and operators. The disks are mechanical devices, so their shape is dictated by function and thus was uniform. E.g. USB flash drives do not have such consistency. What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it. Interesting example. It's worth pointing out here that most characters are not composed entirely of meaning-indicating components; there is e.g. a whole series of compounds of 青 which use it solely to indicate the pronunciation of the compound, not to claim that invitations (请) are somehow metaphysically green (青). But 保 is an exception! Going by wiktionary, it originates as a compound of 人 and 子, both used for the meaning -- protecting is what people do with babies. (Interestingly, the character 仔 exists independently today.) Evolution of the component on the right into 呆 was purely based on shape, and transformed the original meaningful component into something completely arbitrary -- there was no point at which 口 and 木 (as separate from 呆) were conceptually part of the character. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BF%9D https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BF%9D https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E4%BF%9D https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E4%BF%9D
    - nine_k 6y ago
      This is wonderfully apt then! The 2.5" diskette is all envelope and protective curtain, completely concealing the actual disk. (Unlike CD / DVD which are emphatically disk-shaped.)
    - adolph 6y ago
      Thank you for bringing up “口”. I was trying to find a reference of Apple using that as inspiration for the iPhone home button. Maybe the story is apocryphal?
- Angostura 6y ago
  > Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why? > There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. The floppy was the ubiquitous removable storage medium for the first microcomputers with GUIs.
- adolph 6y ago
  My theory would start with shape distinctiveness. While some of the Microsoft iconography uses a vertical rectangle for phone (in the context of adding apps), the blob-ended wide U of the old fashioned telephone handset is still the predominate icon for a telephone. The follow on technologies were much simpler in form and thus make for shapes that are indistinguishable from any other box. An icon needs a high level of distinctiveness to be successful. Likewise, the follow on technologies to small portable storage did not have distinctive and ubiquitous shapes. Maybe a long rectangle with a short end against a square would represent a flash drive? I think that a sibling comment about the 3.5” diskette being present at the birth of GUIs must be part of the answer too since the world didn’t immediately transition to flash drives and other media. All lived together for quite a while. Looking at “floppy icon” search results leads me to believe that many icon designers have never seen an actual 3.5” diskette. On many the shutter is too wide and could not slide open, on others the rotor mating surface is classic iPod low.

Etheryte 6y ago

The main benefit here is not in how accurate the metaphor is today, but how consistently it is used. Save looked roughly the same in the 90s as it does today, across operating systems, across applications, and it's instantly recognizable. Perhaps what's a good comparison is traffic signs: no entry has very little metaphorical meaning but it's universally known and understood.

bluedevil2k 6y ago

I’ve started using the cloud icon with an arrow for save (fa-cloud-upload), implying “this information is being uploaded to the cloud”. No complaints.

Izkata 6y ago

> but the floppy disk metaphor is about three technological phases out of date. It's as if a magneto crank were offered to represent "call." The phone icon used everywhere depicts a corded type (without the cord) that was last popular in the 90s. After that there was a wireless version, then flip-phones, then smartphones. So actually about the same number of iterations out of date.

a_e_k 6y ago
Likewise, the typical alarm clock icon depicting an analogue clock with physical bells on top is also laughably out of date. But it's recognizable!

usrusr 6y ago

> why hasn't a better, more general icon representing the concept of persisting something emerged? Icons are good at representing objects but terrible at representing behavior over time unless it's simple directional movement. How would you symbolize something like the concept of persistence? "Data that can be retrieved unchanged in the future"? A pen, a clock with progression arrows on the hands, and reading glasses? Surely not if there's already an established convention available. The floppy disk happens to be that convention, as the last object that was unambiguously connected to local storage (an optical disk would be ambiguous for recorded music consumption, HDD were supposed to be invisible to the regular user and USB sticks could just as well be any of a variety of radio interfaces in the same form factor). So floppy disk it is. And it's not a problem at all that the convention, once established, is now used by generations that have never seen a floppy, it's just visual language to them. Complaining about the lack of connect between that language and the life realities of it's users seems to me as pointless as complaining that the word dog does not sound like barking at all (why not whoofwhoof?) or that the word hammer does not sound like the noise of hammering (why not banger?). And still, the floppy disk icon is in decline, because applications that eschew local storage tend to use the "arrow up to cloud" icon. Another convention that has absolutely nothing to do with what is actually going on (few datacenters are actually hidden in clouds)