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 disquette-shaped 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.
Software needed a save icon before the floppy disk arrived. Early word processors used a downward arrow, a hard drive cabinet, a tape reel, even a tiny barn. Nothing stuck. When the Macintosh shipped with a small floppy graphic in 1984, the visual stuck immediately because every user knew what the object was and held one in their hand most days.
By 2005, USB drives had won. By 2010, consumer computers stopped shipping floppy slots, and by 2015 most college students had never touched a floppy. None of this changed the icon. Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Adobe Illustrator, every IDE on Earth: still the floppy.
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.
Sources
- Susan Kare, designer of the original Macintosh icon set (interview with The Atlantic, 'Behind the Scenes with the Woman Who Made the Mac Beautiful') (2011)
- PC Magazine, IBM and the Death of the Floppy Disk (2007)
