Riiven Slants
The Floppy Disk
The save button is a memory of a thing you might not remember.
A floppy disk last shipped on a consumer computer around 2010. It has not been a useful object for fifteen years. It is still the universal symbol for save.
The 3.5-inch floppy disk arrived in 1981, held 1.44 megabytes by 1986, and looked exactly like the icon you click to save a document. For two decades it was the most reliable way to move files between computers. School papers, contracts, blueprints, family photos all lived briefly on 1.44 megabytes of plastic and magnetic film.
The icon did not start as a button. The Xerox Star in 1981 put objects on a screen desk: a document, a folder, a file drawer. Susan Kare drew the Macintosh set the next year in the same spirit, where a disk on the desktop meant the disk itself. Saving was a menu command with no picture attached.
The floppy became a verb in the toolbar era. Applications of the early nineties lined the screen with small buttons, and the one meaning save carried a 3.5-inch disk. USB drives had won by 2005. Consumer machines stopped shipping floppy slots. None of it reached the icon.
There is a strange experiment going on here. A symbol that represents a physical object is being used by hundreds of millions of people who cannot recognize the physical object. The metaphor has detached from the referent and is now floating, supported only by the fact that we keep clicking it and it keeps working.
Most software icons get redesigned every few years. Phone got a smartphone, mail got an envelope without a wax seal, search got a magnifying glass that nobody uses to read anymore. The floppy did not move. It is the only icon that grandparents and grandchildren both recognize without knowing what the other one sees.
The tilt
The save icon is the longest-running fossil in user interface design. It outlived the thing it depicts, and we are still drawing it from memory.
