Floppy discs are like Jesus. They died to become the icon of saving.
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.
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.
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”.
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
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".
