Symbolism

Nero burning program used an icon of the colosseum on fire to represent their burn button.
I see no issue with using a floppy disk.
- That’s wasn’t just a disc….?
  
  Nero - burning ROM
  🤷‍♂️

The pointer icon is an arrowhead, ~74000 years old. I don't want to hear people complaining about how old the floppy disk is.
- It's similar to an arrowhead, but is it actually an arrowhead? Or is it just an arrow?
  
  Missing the shaft and fletching.
- nuh uh, mine's a banana. 🍌
  
  #justMicrosoftPlus!ForWindows95things
- Not a d scimmy?

The idea that human society will make it to 4269 as well as the old Twitter logo at the bottom really dates this one. 😥
- People probably said similar at the fall of every empire throughout history. People will endure and build anew. Life finds a way.
  
  Most other empires didn't have the ability to destroy the ecosphere of the planet they lived on.
  The modern empires can do it not just on purpose using nuclear weapons, but also accidentally through climate change.
  Life will find a way, but will civilization? And will the dominant species still be humans?
  
  It's unlikely that people will go extinct, but we're perfectly capable of creating a Mad Max or Fallout type of world.

I like it. It's universally recognisable, you know what it means and what it does.
- It’s only universally recognized because of precedent. The true challenge is to create something that can be understood by someone that has no background with computers (or whatever)
  Like the radiation ☢️ thing, danger ⚠️ , are supposed to be examples of this. Radiation more so because it’s not supposed to rely on language even
  Now excuse me while I press the call button on my phone which is shaped like a landline handset from 30 years ago
  
  For sure, but it doesn't actually matter whether it's abstract from the outset or has become abstract through technological advance so long as it's unique and understood. Someone who's never seen a floppy disk will still learn it quickly, because it's distinctive.
  
  How is the nuclear sign in any way universally understandable? It is properly by learning it's meaning.
  
  It's interesting how that precedent happened though.
  30 years ago saving something basically involved taking a floppy, putting it into the floppy drive, and then hitting a "save" button. That was often because computers didn't even have a hard drive. And, when they did have a hard drive, having your files on a floppy drive was basically the only way to get them onto another computer. So, because of that, a floppy drive was pretty universally recognized as a place where you saved files.
  In the time since then, saving to a hard drive became more common. But, it's hard to use a hard drive as an image for "save" because only computer geeks know what a hard drive actually looks like. Even if you could get people to recognize a hard drive icon it's also ambiguous because you use your hard drive for many other things other than saving. Finally, it's also less necessary to put the save files on external media, because you can email them, upload them, save to the cloud, etc.
  The only physical media where people still save things is USB thumb drives. So, you could put in an image of a USB thumb drive, which more people would recognize, but that's more ambiguous because people only save files to a thumb drive in certain specific cases. It's also harder because there's not really a globally recognized thumb drive image. All floppy drives had to look more or less identical because of the constraints of the disk drive system. But, USB drives only have to have the USB part in common -- and in some cases that's hideable or retractable.
  
  You can make calls on your phone. I gotta text my friends this

There's KDE software (might be a Linux-wide thing, idk) that changed it to a down arrow pointing to a rectangle. I don't like it. I really don't fucking like it.
- Me neither, it looks like it should mean "download".
- Those icons probably come from the default breeze dataset
  
  It's still floppy disk here
- ThatsANoformeDawg.jpg
- That's not true, this is the current version on Arch and it's a floppy.
  
  Huh, interesting. It's probably my icon theme, then. I'll check when I get a chance.
- Got me real curious. What app? Care to share a screenshot?
  
  Here are the icons in the default text editor in Mint Cinnamon. Save is the third from the left (the first 2 are New and Open).
- My Fedora KDE native applications do. But downloaded software still uses the floppy icon if those developers want to.

The Floppy Disk is Computer Jesus. They both died to become the universal symbol of salvation. ;)
- You can still buy new 3 1/2" disks. And usb connected drives are available to read and write them. So they ain't dead.
  But I do pour one out for the 5 1/4". The OG of common portable storage. It was the floppist of the floppies.
  
  OG was the even larger physically / smaller data storage 8" floppy
  
  There's some additional nostalgia attached to calling them with the simple fractions as opposed to the decimal ones, even if they mean the same thing. HDDs for example are still around and I've always seen their form factor as 3.5", not 3 1/2".

My favourite are the kids excited that their mom 3D printed the save icon when she showed them a floppy disk.
- Which never happens yet everyone repeats it as if it's a common occurrence.
  I like the joke, but let's not pretend this is something that happens.

The various symbols found on audio and visual media comes from tape reel machines. Specifically the right arrow Play button only makes sense in relation to tape movement, yet we use it for just about any format to begin play.
- Timelines also progress from left to right, so that one holds up
  
  In cultures with a left-to-right writing system

I'd be surprised if using these kinds of point-and-click GUIs was still common in 2244 years, as opposed to some kind of language- or thought processing. Then again, people are still writing with pen and paper sometimes, despite all the digital advances.
- Pen and paper is still the superior way to make your first draft and anyone who disagrees is wrong.
  
  I hate hand writing and drawing.
  My drafts are computer aided.
  But in case of emergency, I have muscle memory.
  
  Do you imagine how wonderful Lemme could be if everyone drafted theirs posts on paper, prior to clicking "Send"?
- Well, pen & paper was modern 2 kya.

My wife coaches high school field hockey. She told me how one day she overheard them talking about how one of them lost their work on a homework document and had to start over.
One of the girls said "you just gotta get in the habit of clicking the blue square", which the others were confirming is the thing to do. So then my wife asks "blue square, what do you mean" and another clarified "the save button".
They had no idea what a floppy disc was
- I had to explain the save button to my 9 year old about a week ago. And then I found myself explaining what a floppy disk was. Tonight I'll ask him if he knows what that is a picture of. I'll be impressed if he remembers. If he fails the check, imma gonna launch into a lecture on boot disks, games, and batch files. Wish me luck!
  
  Teach him how to manually specify his interrupts and to tune his extended RAM so he can play games.

I've seen a growing number of programs that use an arrow pointing towards a picture of a computer or hard drive for "save* and an arrow pointing away from it for "load" and I feel like that's very graceful skeuomorph to shift to that might hold up for longer (although it breaks if it's talking about cloud save, but replace the picture of a computer with picture of a cloud and you're back in business I suppose)
- I've seen those being used as download and upload but not for saving.
  
  I want to say the game Soviet Republic Workers and Resources uses the exact iconography I described including for cloud savings vs locally but I could be misremembering
  
  Downloading is a type of saving

Skeuomorphism is the word your looking for, its why your digital cameras still make a mechanical click sound even through there isnt a mechanical shutter

Maybe, just maybe, someday it gets updated to an SD Card.

Also the phone app icon still resembles one of those old banana units, even though phones haven't looked that way in 25+ years.

Path dependency

This is the future I want

so shall it be

The idea of hover cars have always been so silly to me. Yes let's waste energy on counteracting gravity instead of just using a wheel lmao
- They're good for rough terrain, so ironically a tractor is one of the less silly things to make hover
  
  Also tyres destroy the crop they drive over
  
  You got me there it does make sense for a tractor
- And designing your hover trtactor in the style of 2000 tractors is as much symbolism as the floppy disc.icon.