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A joke about the floppy disk in 2014, and the alphabet of the obsolete

3d model of the save icon

Found via Programming Geeks on Google+. Click the cartoon to see the source.

I wonder how long developers — especially Windows developers, who are by far the biggest culprits — will insist on using the now-defunct floppy disk as an icon for “save”.

Not too far behind floppy disks are optical disks, which appear on John Atkinson’s “Alphabet of the Obsolete”:

alphabet of the obsolete

Click the image to see the source.

9 replies on “A joke about the floppy disk in 2014, and the alphabet of the obsolete”

We took our young kids to Disney a few years ago, and in the “Honey I Shrunk The Kids” kids playground they had a good time sliding down the Kodak film roll…. they had no idea what it was, but they had a good time. “Dad, I get all the large ants and things, but what is this black wavy thing ?”

@Stuart Dobson: The alternative is not having a manual “save” function. Apple and cloud services such as Evernote and Google Apps understand this. When I create something, it should be saved.

The “act of saving” is an artificial one created due to the limitations of early computers and was always a cognitive hurdle for the non-techie user. When I write on paper, the writing doesn’t disappear if I fail to press a magic button. The same should be true of applications used to generate content.

When you write on paper, there’s no delete button.

I used a word processor on an Apple Newton MessagePad 2000, and it saved more or less continuously. If I deleted text, it was deleted forever. This caused me to lose data.

“Save” creates a checkpoint to which to revert unintentional changes. Would renaming it to “Create Timestamped Checkpoint” be acceptable? And if so, what icon would you propose for this action other than a 3.5″ floppy disk?

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