Have you ever noticed that the save icon is a floppy disk? | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever noticed that the save icon is a floppy disk?

en.rattibha.com

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Have you ever noticed that the 'direction' icon is an arrow?

The whole idea of icon symbols is to replace a text word (which only works in one language) with a picture (which can work in multiple languages).

Those pictures are extremely often 'out of date' as their accepted usage lasts long after the objects themselves that are shown are removed from daily use. When was the last time you fired an arrow in a specific direction?

This is true with language in general.

Like when you say there is a window on your desktop, both of those things are metaphors. They are like their namesake in some regard.

There are languages where the word for door is the same as mouth, and window resembles the word for eye.

But the idea of a door would be a door-icon, and that of an eye would be an eye-icon. Hence why icons persist as a multi-language communications system.

Proof once more (were it necessary) that Alan Kay was and is right when he says that computing is a pop culture -- one which rarely, if at all, acknowledges its past.

I understand the save icon might be out dated since no one uses floppy disks anymore, but what icon would you use instead?

We could have an icon of a stack of platters, with an arrow pointing down towards them. The platters, of course, represent the platters in a hard drive.

Sure, this is becoming obsolete now with SSDs, but mechanical HDs are still very commonplace in many applications, especially for storing large amounts of data (they're cheaper per GB than SSD). Even if everyone stopped using mechanical HDs tomorrow, this icon would still be much more current than one with a floppy disk, which almost no one has used for a decade or more. People will still remember mechanical HDs for a while, but younger people now have never used a floppy disk.

A hard disk will buy us some time but

1) everybody knew how a floppy disk is made inside because you can peek inside the opening and see the disk. I think not everyone saw a photo of an open hard disk.

2) Almost nobody born today will hold a hard disk in their hands. We'll be back to the floppy disk problem soon.

The correct solution should be an icon about the very idea of persisting data or making it safe.

>I think not everyone saw a photo of an open hard disk.

Maybe not, but it does have the word "disc" (misspelled "disk"), so I think most computer users (and I mean people who would actually use a "save to disk" button; most mobile-only users probably never do now) would make the connection.

>Almost nobody born today will hold a hard disk in their hands. We'll be back to the floppy disk problem soon.

Depends on your definition of "soon". Seems to me my solution would buy us another 20 years at least.

>The correct solution should be an icon about the very idea of persisting data or making it safe.

That's much easier said than done. If there was an easy way of depicting this with a graphic icon, I think it would have been done in the last 40+ years. This thread, and surely countless like it over the years in various places, show that no one seems to have any good ideas for a simple graphic icon to express this concept.

Floppy disks are a very unreliable storage. Let's use something that has proven to resist the passage of time: chisel, hammer, stone /grin

Or do without technology. The idea is that we want to have those data available in the future. So anything that hints about the future. No idea what.

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