Hacker News Reader

Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

Hour glass, floppy disk, envelope, AA style battery for laptops, and now manilla folders go on the pile of icons that are too abstract for people to recognize anymore. What next, people won't recognize the sheet of paper for document anymore? Clipboards are probably already weird now.

View on HN

I don’t know if hour glasses belong in there. Surely those were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed. Also, I would imagine that most young people still have to occasionally interact with envelopes (government stuff, maybe paying some bills) and cylindrical dry batteries (TV remotes, home thermostats).

> Surely [hour glasses] were already mostly decorative when the first hourglass computer icons were developed

I was a toddler when these icons were created, but I can think of two notable exceptions: egg timers (which my family still used when I was a kid) and board game timers (the canonical example of which, in my mind, is the one that used to ship with Boggle).

I think when it comes to folders it's not due to time but rather regional differences. I don't think this particular style of folders is something that was popular in my country bureaucracies.

Even electric vehicles use the AA style battery metaphor in their UI.

Perhaps not the best example for how abstract something is. The 18650 battery cells that most electric vehicles use looks very similar to an AA battery. You certainly couldn’t tell them apart from an icon.

A fair point. Do the lithium cells have the protruding button on the positive end?

Apologies for the late reply, only just saw your question. In case you haven’t answered it yourself: Some appear to have the “button top” that you know from AA’s but most appear to omit those. But even those without the button top have a smaller contact on the positive side similar to the button top.

So do cellphones

I have heard anecdotally that a significant and growing number of children and young people have difficulty reading analog clocks.

also telephone icon

And ox head (https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-letter)

Who knows what these things will look like a few millennia from now.

Nice link, great info, thanks.

Any idea what this quote means?

> In the Phoenician alphabet the letter stood for a species of breathing, as vowels were not represented in the Semitic alphabets.

What exactly is a _species of breathing_?

Some kind of typo or misunderstanding. "A" represented the glottal stop, not the vowel sound. Maybe the person who wrote that article was struggling to explain what a glottal stop was? Either way, its nonsense.

Reference?

It's a pronunciation reference. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_breathing and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_breathing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com