Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.
Compare it to the things that came before and after:
- Punch Cards
- Magnetic tapes
- 8 and 5.25 inch floppies in flexible sleeves
- 3.5 inch diskettes
- CDs
- USB drives
- Memory Cards
Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.
Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.
3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.
I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.
someone’s got a hardon for a floppy
We have found so many new ways to create energy … yet we still use it to heat water to turn a turbine
By then they could use 100% solar energy.
I genuinely hope this is wrong and we are not still stapling ear tags on livestock in 4269.
Where are my Star Trek-style food replicators?
naw , RFID tags or gtfo
That’s not livestock, it’s just the genetically engineered intelligent cow species we made for fun. It’s wearing an earring.
That cow was probably uplifted to sentient by then and wears the ear tag “ironically to honor her ancestors”. Why? Don’t ask me, I don’t understand stupid kids and their style!
/runs off into the cornfield
I am pretty sure that the save icon 💾 will have changed across 2244 years, similar to the letter A
Wow, A is shaped like Taurus. As a professional astronomer, I would never have figured that out on my own.
I mean based on your post the letter A hasn’t really changed in 1911 years… The invention of a reliable way of storing information really contributes to the fidelity of what’s being passed on, and especially now with computers our symbols are so ubiquitous that I really don’t know if they will change.
Hell you could even argue it’s still more or less the same as the Phoenician version since the bulkier Greek alpha in that format is generally reserved for stone and type face. The Phoenician one is basically how I do my print A just rotated.
I was thinking the same thing. It should have at least morphed into an SD card by now.
There’s no reason to change any icons, the same way there’s no reason to change the way letters or numbers are written.
Nœ ᚳiddᛝ, þæts ᚻow I feᛚt.
As an ancient person who grew up during the transition from actually floppy 5.25 inch disks to rigid 3.5 disks, it really bothers me that the hard ones are called “floppy.”
I know it’s about the innards still being flexible inside the plastic shell, but I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones.
For the confused:
I grew up calling those (save icon ones) hard disks to distinguish them from the floppy ones
This was just you. I’m also from the before-times, and was using cassettes as a storage medium before even seeing my first floppy drive. But, nobody called the ones with a sliding window “hard drives”. Diskettes, maybe, but more frequently just floppies, or 3.5 inch floppies to distinguish them from the bigger ones.
IBM PCs introduced computers with hard drives before they even switched to the 3.5 inch format. The earliest IBM PCs only had 5.25 inch floppies, often 2 drives. But the XT from 1983 came with a 10 MB drive by default, but still used 5.25 inch floppies. By the time IBM switched to 3.5 inch floppies, the hard drive was well established. That was in about 1987 with the PS/2 models.
The earliest Mac computers took a surprisingly long time to come with a hard drive. The earliest model Macs starting in 1984 came with 3.5 inch drives and no hard drive. It wasn’t until 1987 that Macs started coming with hard drives. So, I could maybe imagine someone who used macs not knowing what a hard drive was during that 3-year window. OTOH, someone who only used Macs wouldn’t have known about 5.25 inch drives because Macs never used those, so there wouldn’t have been a need to distinguish between 5.25 inch drives and 3.5 inch ones.
Thanks for the nostalgia hit, I never used the 8” ones, but 5.25” was my childhood using the C64. I used to pirate so much using those bad boys :) Sadly, my best friend at the time only had a cassette drive and loading stuff would take ages so we mostly played at my place.
This is how it would sound :) almost as iconic as the dial-up sound for me.
Similar to the sound of the dot matrix printer, 😂
Bonus points for including an 8" disk as well, which even most computer nerds have never seen one of in real life.
Even more bonus points for including an IZOT Bulgarian 8" disk, just the same as I’ve seen at my dad’s workplace as a kid 😄 They kept them on the shelves for historical reasons at this point I guess, because most PCs there had the 3.25" ones.
Damn, this took me down memory lane… now I need some Fortran punchcards to wipe my tears with.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game) I think I found the game
Amazing! That’s exactly it!
I would be confident just based on the summary, but I remember that minigame where you pilot the boat in the harbor.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.
Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.
For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.
They were popular, just prohibitively expensive for very little storage.
I mean, at home we had HDDs long before 3.5" drives. And although paltry today, having 10, 20, and 40mb fses were really nice at the time
The first computers had one, sometimes two floppy drives, and zero hdds.
The first computers had neither
The disks (circles) inside are all floppy. Just the exterior got more rigid.
“Is your disk hard or floppy?”
Depends. The classic dilemma of big, thin, and floppy or short, thick, and stiff.
I’m confused. Those all look equally hard to me
(Also, I was born in 2009)
The big ones are not rigid, they flop around. The smaller ones (the save icon ones) have a rigid plastic case that does not flop. Inside both kinds is a floppy disk though, hence them both having that name. “Hard disks” have metal platters that decidedly do not flop, in or out of their case.
The left two are bendable like a fedex envelope, the one on the right is hard plastic
It might help to take a closer look at the height of each disk casing to guess why two are called floppy and one hard.
The black and orange are 8" and 5.25" floppy disks. The blue one is a 3.5" diskette. There was also a 3" diskette that was widely used for instance by Amstrad. It was very similar to 3.5" with the built in shutter for protection of the disk.
But the official name for 3½ inch was “Micro diskette” ergo **diskette" was a short form adopted, and calling it floppy is IMO technically wrong.
There were several differences between a floppy and a diskette, that made the diskette superior in practical use, as mentioned the shutter made the diskette easier to handle, as it didn’t need to be taken in and out of sleeves when used, it was easier to transport in for instance a school bag, because of the more sturdy harder plastic, and the metal shutter is way more solit than the paper sleeve used for floppies. 3 and 3½" also had a tab for enabling write protection and removing it again indefinitely, unlike the clumsy taping over the notch on a 5.25" floppy.
There is no way 3" and 3.5" are called floppy, their correct name is diskette.
Obviously they are not hard disks, that’s even worse than calling them floppies.But many people already back when they were at their height, misnamed diskettes as floppies, so the more accurate naming scheme never really stuck, and today diskette is called a floppy even on Wikipedia. 🤡
Similarly a drive for 3" and 3,5 inch diskettes is called a diskette drive not a floppy drive, which obviously is for floppies.
Diskettes were frequently called floppies by nearly everyone including manufacturers.
Not originally no, at least not here in Denmark in the mid 80’s. Nobody called them floppy among the people and dealers I knew, and I knew a lot of people who were computer enthusiasts. I also knew several dealers, since we used more than a thousand diskettes per month, to distribute software. I think the bad habit of using wrong terms didn’t really happen until the computer illiterate began to use computers too, either for work or for early internet.
People who called them floppy came later, and were mostly people that might as well have called them thingies.99.99% of people in the US and UK did.
Don’t forget your phone icon!
My employer insisted we had to change the phone icon because young drivers may have never seen a phone like that. I finally got them to look at their iPhone and say now which icon do you press to make a phone call? Great now if you saw an icon of an iPhone could it also mean playing music? What else could it mean?
I find this one funny because we only see that icon on the device that has replaced that style phone, yet the device looks nothing like that
Current device doesn’t look like anything really, featureless black slab that it is, so no wonder.
There’s a growing trend to make the save icon a down arrow ⬇️ which confuses the hell out of my millennial brain.
IMO it should be an almost square rectangle with a slightly offset circle inside. Which could symbolize a floppy disk, a hard drive, a tape drive, or just “putting the data inside your box”.It can’t be a down arrow, that means download. That’s illegal
OK, we’ll replace it with this: ☁️
as the monkey’s paw curls one finger down.
💀
A USB stick is probably the best. Now USB-A or USB-C?
Surely that will never become anachronistic.
We’ll have unlimited fusion power too, yet it’ll still be derived from spinning steam turbines.
Look, if YOU find a fluid that is incompressible in liquid form, liquid at room temperature, gaseous at temperatures lower than the melting points of most construction materials, has a low viscosity, can dissolve almost anything but is completely nontoxic, has a high heat capacity, is capable of ionic dissociation, is polar, and, oh yeah, also incredibly cheap, do let us know!
I was going to disagree, then I opened my code editor… then my word processor… holy crap. I haven’t used a floppy since 1995.
Same thing in libreoffice
Pretty dope future.
