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Comment by gfody | Hacker News Reader

searched for "save" .. ten pages of variations on the 3.5" diskette icon all labeled "floppy" even though diskettes aren't floppy. I wonder when a new save icon will emerge?

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The "floppy disk" always (even with 5.25" and 8" disks) referred to the disk inside the casing, not the casing (which wasn't particularly floppy on the bigger disks, and wasn't a disk on any of them.)

I always thought it came from the fact that the old 8-inchers were physically flexible.

The storage media was a floppy disk (literally) for all three sizes The casing was either flexible but not really floppy (for the 8- and 5.25-inch versions) or rigid (for the 3.5-inch version) and square (not a disk) for all three versions.

So the only thing that "floppy disk" ever made sense for, even for the 8" ones, is the storage media inside the casing, not the casing.

So were the 5.25"s but the 3.5"s were not, and were still 'floppy disks'.

It's floppy on the inside[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Image3...

The paradigm of "saving" is going away. In "new" apps this can hardly be found. Users expect that all stuff is saved automatically all the time. Files and such are a legacy from the old desktop world.

there were some interesting alternatives to the diskette icon if you scroll to the very bottom of the search results after searching "save" .. the micro sd card and thumbdrive icons are cool and I think pretty intuitive for "save"

Are you South African, perchance? (As far as I know, South Africa is the only country that exclusively called 3.5" floppies "stiffy disks").

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