Your Children Will Never Know Where These Are From

Once Upon A Time, we kept our important
information on devices vulnerable
to refrigerator magnets

I just noticed something the other day. Computers, even the newest iterations of Windows 8 and Office, still are using the icon of the 3 ½ inch floppy disk for the “Save” symbol. I started wondering, “How many generations from the floppy disk will we go before we change to something else? To what can this be changed?” There is an entire generation of kids, they’re in school now, who have never even seen a real floppy disk.

To start off, I can tell you that the last 3 computers I have owned do not have a 3 ½ inch floppy slot. In fact, our family’s most recent acquisition doesn’t even have a CD drive in it.

Ten years ago, 2002, is the historical point where most major PC manufacturers stopped producing computers with floppy disk drives, though Apple stopped supporting them in 1998 (and were more than willing to sell you an external adapter separately, some things never change).

We've got this File Cabinet Metaphor
and we're stickin' to it.

So here we are, a decade later, and the floppy disk is still our ubiquitous symbol for “save”.

Granted, there aren’t many alternatives. You could have a picture of a hard drive instead. I’m personally a fan of a symbol including the Folder metaphor, maybe with an arrow pushing a piece of paper down in there.



Left to Right, 5.25' Floppy, 3.5' Floppy, Flash Drive,
SD Card, Micro SD Card, The Atom

The successor to the Floppy Disk, in terms of ease of use and dominance in the computing landscape, is the USB flash drive. Yet we still don’t see those up there. While flash drives do differ in their outward appearance, with some being backpack tags or keychains, others being shaped like little bears or LEGO bricks or toy cars, I think that the standard is that packet-of-gum sized dongle with the little USB plug on the end. A stylized version of that would work much better.

This won't confuse your
Grandma any more than
the Floppy Symbol.

Something which has disappointed me is that the SD card hasn’t taken up more dominance as the portable recordable media. While it is the standard for digital cameras, their utility for file transfer has been low.

Here in my home office, I have about a dozen or so SD cards floating around. My desktop, laptop, and tablet have SD slots in them, as well as my work computers. Whenever I have to transfer media from one computer to another, I use an SD card. I even used one to install Windows 8 on a computer instead of using a CD.

I like SD cards. They’re durable, the size of a postage stamp, and when I put one in my laptop, I don’t have to take it out before I pack my computer in its bag. This is in opposition to the USB drive, which I have broken or bent through setting something on it while plugged in, or packing up my computer and forgetting there is a flash drive in the back socket, only to hear a crunch as it snaps off.

I suppose the problem is that they can be lost so easily, being no bigger than a quarter, and can’t be easily affixed to a keychain or lanyard. Any grade school teacher, however, will tell you that “I lost my flash drive” has become the new “my dog ate my homework” for this current generation of school-going children.

So I’ll continue to use SD cards as my Floppy Disk replacement. I love that I can use them in our Wii and in my PDA as well, and can go from taking a picture on the camera to loading it onto my computer without the use of an extra USB cable.

When was the last time you used a
phone that was shaped like this?
Go throw it out. Right now. I'll wait.

Another symbol I’ve noticed is antiquated is the typical “barbel” phone handset icon found on all cell phones. This symbol, which is an imitation of the 1940s era occasional-murder-weapon handset is everywhere.

The problem is, nobody has a phone shaped like that anymore. Almost all current cell phones are the Mostly Used Bar of Soap shape, unless you still have a flip-phone, which still doesn’t really look like a barbel.

Smartphone Design Inspiration #1
Soon, you'll be able to press your
old phone into the back of your
new one to make it last longer.
Shown here is the bold, refreshing,
innovative, stark boring bland
iColor scheme.

Even for house phones, they have all deviated from that old shape. It is getting harder and harder to find a non-cordless phone in the stores, and even when one does, they tend to be shaped more like partially flattened bananas than the old handset. Modern cordless fall more in the Big Wad O’ Phone with buttons category, being minimally ergonomic, poorly balanced, and yet another reason to drop your landline.



I know that in my parents house, we had mostly cordless phones since the late 90s. Just as with the Floppy Disk, this current generation will not grow up knowing that phones ever really had that barbel shape, except for movies where everything looks “old fashioned”. To our children, the barbel phone will be as that comical old wooden phone with the hand crank, conical mouthpiece, and bells that make the whole thing look like an Easter Island Head.



The New 1887 community phone!
The same one some small town
Nebraska post offices still have on the wall!

So what do we move on to from here? On your phone, you have a little symbol that looks like your cell phone, the Phone within a Phone symbol?  Or maybe a symbol featuring a head with a  phone to it in order to demonstrate-again to these newest generations-that the phone can actually be used to talk, in addition to  text, games, email, Twitter, Skype, Facebook, and really bad GPS functionality.

 

I guess that we will keep these symbols around until we are no longer even using their functions, eliminating regular phone calls and the need to save progress manually.