The floppy is actually dead but hasn’t really gone away

Posted by Jonathan on January 6th, 2008 filed in vintage computing

It lives!  It lives!!

The floppy, popularised in it’s 3.5″ format by Sony in the early 80′s has died.  New PC’s don’t come with floppy drives, laptops dumped floppies for CD-ROMs years ago and it’s getting harder and harder to find even USB floppy drives in the big box stores.  My 11 year-old takes a USB flash drive to and from school and current version of my wife’s embroidery machine has a USB port instead of the floppy drive.

But we don’t seem to have found a replacement for the iconic 3.5″ floppy.

Witness Windows Vista’s journal utility… the floppy icon is still there for the “Save” action.

Of course this is a general “save to some media” icon – it doesn’t mean that it’s only “save to floppy” or even only “save to removable media”.

It’s save to hard drive, floppy drive, CD-writeable, DVD-writeable, flash drive, SD card, XD card, even internet site, blog.

Who knows what next we’ll be saving our documents to?

Quantum drives?  The ever-promised-but-never-quite-delivered Internet drive?

So what should the “new save icon” be?

What represents a generic “save” operation?

Should it be the now ubiquitous USB drive?

Of course, this assumes that we will actually need a “save” command….

Proposals welcome!