Floppy discs are like Jesus. They died to become the icon of saving.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Until autosave took over at least.
Guess there’s nothing left worth saving.
This is like boomers who fantasize about millenials breaking down in tears when confronted with a rotary phone or vinyl record or gramophone. The whole premise is ridiculous and always revolves around an item so iconic its use is immediately obvious to anyone who's ever, like, seen a movie.
Now I guess old cranky farts being old cranky farts shouldn't matter, if it wasn't for the fact that their unfounded opinions on Gen Z's supposed ignorance are already breaking UX patterns everywhere. The save icon is going away, and now it's a guessing game as to which button has replaced it. Is it the little cloud? The down arrow, or the up arrow? Is there even an icon? Who knows!
unfounded
I mean... my students fresh outta high school in college don't understand filetypes, folders, or that you can't break a website by exploring it. Lots of them say things like "but, I can't open a doc file. I don't have Word." Or email me a "google doc file" as a submission.
Shit's handed to them on mobile in big-buttoned friendly webapps.
The save icon is going away
Since when? Everybody knows that icon means "save", even if they don't know the history behind it. You don't need to know what a floppy is in order to understand that this symbol means "save".
Idk if it's that extreme or needs such a vitriolic reaction, but obsolescence is always lurking around the corner.
I personally think that there will never not be a demand for physical storage in a tiny thumb sized package, but I'm not so arrogant as to assume it's the End Of Storage. Hell, I bet disks seemed pretty great and advanced at the time too.
So, I know it's an old take to laugh at people that don't know x that older people took for granted. The idea here was rather to give it a more respectful spin. Nobody's ridiculed here. It's supposed to give it this point of view of the older guy that doesn't make fun of the younger ones but just reminds them that they'll be in the same shoes eventually, with stuff that they took for granted fading into obscurity. You know, taking a more humble stance, without being condescending.
On another note, the save icon going away might have something to do with programs just writing everything to storage anytime ASAP so the whole idea of writing to disk just disappears. Don't know if I like that workflow though, I'm too used to saving my work.
The browser version of Office 365 frustrates me the most with this, their autosave works well but it is impossible to "save as" anything. They just allow to download an xlsx copy, and I have to open that in LibreOffice to convert to CSV or whatever is relevant. And of course no save icon to download the xlsx because someone decided a skeumorphic floppy disk is too incongruent with the cloud.
I'm sorry if I came off as a bitter asshole (I guess I kinda am), it's just that this common sentiment feels patronizing because "outdated" ≠ "obscure". Like, pagers I would say are actually obscure because they were more of a gimmick than a truly mass-market product, but floppies and CDs were in such wide circulation for such a long time that I'd expect a teenager to recognize one at a glance even if they have never personally used that technology.
Huh, I thought pagers were still a thing in medicine/hospitals.
So are fax and floppies for really old processes and equipment, but pagers are not visually/culturally iconic and most people never had one so most people born after 2000 wouldn't recognize them at a glance unless they worked in a specific field that uses severely outdated tech. Hell, there are probably still industrial machines in production somewhere that take punch cards.
I'll just have to make software that shows a USB symbol for the save icon.
And you have to click on it in the right spot or it doesn't work.
Or there's a 70% chance you have to click it three times.
wtf is a thumb drive? Does it allow you to track your keys? Why is that USB port rectangular? Aren’t those just for stealing Hyundai cars?
Yeah, this joke is dated because flash drives are already out of fashion. Most people just use cloud storage.
I love the accuracy of this. The original release of Win95 on floppy was 13x 3.5" discs. And Zak McKracken originally was on 5.25".
Me with the CD-ROM version of Win95, after having installed a CD-ROM drive in my 486 in anticipation:
I watched Weezer's Buddy Holly music video and everything.
I have vivid memories of my Win 95 computer that came preinstalled. I had to buy a bunch of empty floppies and spend what felt like an eternity just inserting it one after another so I would get my set of Windows installation disks.
I was 15 when it released and I had pre-ordered it on CD from Babbage's. The local Babbage's has previously tried to scam me out of a modem before, so it was no surprise when they gave me the wrong edition. I get home (which was about 45 min away and I didn't have a driver's license yet) and realize they gave me floppies. Said screw it, installed (going thru the painful process of disk swapping), then returned the damn thing the next week. Luckily this was before activation keys were a thing.
"What's a thumb drive?"
Generation _ doesn't know thing as well as generation _ is the least funny tired joke set up possible.
Right?? We (people who don‘t work with that subject daily) don’t even know how to build pyramids anymore!
Now I'm curious what a thumb drive might be replaced by... The only significant change I could foresee right now is updating from USB A to USB C.
Oooh... Are we gonna have data crystals? :O
I've already met students who never used one before. They keep everything in cloud storage
Er... Yeah, I guess the only thing you really need a thumb drive for these days is installing an OS. Or being super paranoid. 🤔
Passing evidence to cops, they prefer physical media for some reason.
Enough to run out and buy one instead of a download link. :/
Cloud is probably the short term, but long term, holographic is something people are dabbling with.
Does gen z know what a flash drive is?
Not sure how to update the comic for cloud 🤔
No one comments on my Jazz Zip Drive.
That's because Jazz Drives and Zip Drives were two different things (albeit both made by Iomega).
I thought I was cutting edge with my LS-120. It was obviously going to be the next format because it was backwards compatible.
That doesn't make any sense.