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Comment by orliesaurus | Hacker News Reader

Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.

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Ugh, I hope we're not trying to kill the floppy save. There's nothing wrong with anachronistic icons as long as their meaning is well-established. Phone receivers haven't looked like this for a long time: [phone symbol here], but they're still useful symbology for "call" and "hang up".

Edit: apparently hn hates emoji.

I showed my son (age nine) a floppy disk a couple of months ago. His immediate comment? "Wow, a 3d-printed save icon!"

Sigh.

Is this actually happening to lots of parents/kids or is this joke that lots of people copy from each other? https://www.google.com/search?q=Wow%2C+a+3d-printed+save+ico...

Quite possibly both? I can definitely see where my son is coming from, as he's only seen floppies once in his life, whereas even his Nintendo Switch uses a floppy to indicate that it is saving his progress. Must be baffling.

I hadn't felt as old as I did then since I bumped into the first kid who didn't know what a landline was. ("Imagine a cellphone with no battery, so you needed to keep it plugged in at all times...")

> who didn't know what a landline was

I feel like you've been had another time.

At least I keep hoping that kids see plenty of those in older movies.

The Verge even wrote an article about how common the joke is. [1]

Not to say it didn’t happen to lb1lf.

1: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/24/16505912/floppy-disk-3d-...

This gets funnier. I just asked the little one whether his comment had been as spontaneous as it had seemed at the time, and got a sigh and eyes rolling for my trouble.

"Dad, it is a joke off the Internet. All the kids in school say that whenever they see a diskette."

Now I feel really old.

Don't forget that the kids have all those websites cataloging memes and such, and they often have extensive research on origins of those things.

Well, the complete concept of "saving" becomes less and less relevant. With apps and websites there often is no explicit need to save. Just edit the document and all changes are immediately synced up to persistent (cloud) storage.

Not just explicit saving, but the whole concept of documents and especially files is disappearing under our noses. Somewhat disconcertingly nobody seems particularly worried that our whole model of computing is shifting away from file-oriented systems. Remember that DOS stands for Disk Operating System, managing files was arguably one of the main functions of it. Now days our data is locked up inside "services" and "apps", not in user-accessible files.

And a key feature of Windows 95 was the explorer with your home directory where you could doubleclick on files and the appropriate application would open, so users won't have to think about the application, but the file first.

However abstracting away from a pure file based view also has benefits, like history or having different views on the document (i.e. to share a read only version)

The main question is: How well will those things serve as lock-in in future, GDPR does a first step there by enforcing that there is a way to extract the data (not that the export format neccisarily is is really usable ...)

Windows was document-centric in other respects, too. For example, the standard UX guidelines defined three types of apps: dialog, single-document interface, and multi-document interface. Most apps were actually expected to be of the last two varieties, and the guidelines covered a lot of points on how it was all supposed to look. And when it came to implementation, frameworks like MFC were designed around that concept as well, with the ability to automatically handle things like multiple views into the same document.

UX designers actually fought for this for ages. Like, at least since the 80s.

“Save the document?” is a stupid question: of course I want the program to preserve what I do. But I also need a way to roll back the changes afterwards if I discover a mistake.

I enjoy opening a photo in photoshop and just putzing around with filters and tools to see what they do. I expect it to throw away my changes unless I explicitly state I want to keep them.

Or you could just click “revert to the original” about the same way as you click “discard changes.” With the difference that your use-case is super rare whereas saving the changes is what everyone wants almost every time.

It is removed from a lot of MS office software (online versions) and it is a complete disaster, because nobody took their time to evaluate some of the most basic use cases.

Users often use a document as a template. Better teach them to SAVE! it under a different name first before editing anything. If they fail that step, content vanishes regularly.

I love how concepts like "folder structures" apparently get deprecated. Yeah, sure, because a tree is bad to model relations. It is like when we removed table of contents from books and just added the required meta information to a long list. Sumerian literature can suck it.

Sorry for the rant, but I already know the transgressions we will have to endure. I want to just save documents in a defined state. No, I do not want to tag it.

This rolling save mechanic would have been possible without a persistent cloud storage. Why just have these bad ideas now?

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