Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that it is unworkable or a detriment to the function of some system.
Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why?
There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. There have been flash devices and cloud services and other stuff since. Yet, for some possibly interesting reason we got stuck on disks, and floppy disks in particular.
3.5" disks is what most people had on their work and home computers since early 1990s if not late 1980s. 5.25" floppy disks became rare after, say, 1995. I suppose nobody had punched tape on their home or office computers, it was in the realm of programmers and operators.
The disks are mechanical devices, so their shape is dictated by function and thus was uniform. E.g. USB flash drives do not have such consistency.
What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it.
> What the endgame of symbols look like is easy to see in Chinese / Japanese. E.g. "save" 保 consists of a man, a mouth, and a tree. It's about as easy to make sense of as a combination of a square with a cut corner and a rectangle inside it.
Interesting example. It's worth pointing out here that most characters are not composed entirely of meaning-indicating components; there is e.g. a whole series of compounds of 青 which use it solely to indicate the pronunciation of the compound, not to claim that invitations (请) are somehow metaphysically green (青).
But 保 is an exception! Going by wiktionary, it originates as a compound of 人 and 子, both used for the meaning -- protecting is what people do with babies. (Interestingly, the character 仔 exists independently today.) Evolution of the component on the right into 呆 was purely based on shape, and transformed the original meaningful component into something completely arbitrary -- there was no point at which 口 and 木 (as separate from 呆) were conceptually part of the character.
This is wonderfully apt then! The 2.5" diskette is all envelope and protective curtain, completely concealing the actual disk. (Unlike CD / DVD which are emphatically disk-shaped.)
Thank you for bringing up “口”. I was trying to find a reference of Apple using that as inspiration for the iPhone home button. Maybe the story is apocryphal?
I haven't heard of this. It doesn't make a ton of sense to me; 口 is an obsolete word for "mouth" which survives as part of other words like 人口 "population" or 出口 "exit [noun]" in the senses of "mouth" or "entrance; opening". (Compare "the mouth of a cave".)
My theory would start with shape distinctiveness. While some of the Microsoft iconography uses a vertical rectangle for phone (in the context of adding apps), the blob-ended wide U of the old fashioned telephone handset is still the predominate icon for a telephone. The follow on technologies were much simpler in form and thus make for shapes that are indistinguishable from any other box. An icon needs a high level of distinctiveness to be successful.
Likewise, the follow on technologies to small portable storage did not have distinctive and ubiquitous shapes. Maybe a long rectangle with a short end against a square would represent a flash drive? I think that a sibling comment about the 3.5” diskette being present at the birth of GUIs must be part of the answer too since the world didn’t immediately transition to flash drives and other media. All lived together for quite a while.
Looking at “floppy icon” search results leads me to believe that many icon designers have never seen an actual 3.5” diskette. On many the shutter is too wide and could not slide open, on others the rotor mating surface is classic iPod low.
Floppies were what everyone used to store things at the same time that GUIs were coming into wide adoption, so the first save icons were floppies. And then they never updated the icon. Floppies were a thing from like 1970-2000. That's 30 years! No wonder the icon is still around.
Yes, I know. I'm not arguing that it is unworkable or a detriment to the function of some system.
Again, why did we stop with disks? Right or wrong that's what happened. Why?
There were punch cards and tapes and other stuff before disks. There have been flash devices and cloud services and other stuff since. Yet, for some possibly interesting reason we got stuck on disks, and floppy disks in particular.