Archaic Iconography

In many com­put­er appli­ca­tions1, you’ll find a tool­bar which con­tains a save tool & icon. Almost with­out fail, that icon is of a flop­py disk (most close­ly resem­bling a blue 3 1/2″ flop­py). But why not a com­put­er hard dri­ve (though those often end up look­ing like sar­dine tins in small icons) or a reel-to-reel tape? It is inter­est­ing that we sort of all agreed on one slice out of our tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry to agree upon as the stan­dard for sav­ing data. Of course, the irony of using this for to exe­cute a save com­mand is that very few com­put­ers today have a flop­py dri­ve at all and using these as a pri­ma­ry method of sav­ing pre­dates even the 3 1/2″ flop­py itself.

I’ve often won­dered if I’ll have to show my kids a old flop­py disk to explain the his­to­ry of the icon. That is, assum­ing I can even find one around here. When I did my Spring clean­ing last year, I had to bor­row a USB flop­py dri­ve from my father-in-law since I did­n’t have a com­put­er handy to even read those disks. Regard­less, I believe the icon itself will be large­ly abstract to them; though I don’t doubt they’ll learn to rec­og­nize what func­tion it rep­re­sents imme­di­ate­ly. They will become sym­bols more than direct rep­re­sen­ta­tions, which isn’t a bad thing in of itself2

Sim­i­lar­ly, you might find a old phone hand­set rep­re­sent­ing calls or phone func­tions and a snail-mail enve­lope for cre­at­ing or check­ing e‑mail. These, too, are out­dat­ed (or near­ly, in the case of the enve­lope) tools to rep­re­sent their dig­i­tal replacements.

But then, what icon bet­ter rep­re­sents sav­ing data? Or mak­ing phone calls? Or send­ing mail?

  1. This is most­ly a Win­dows and Lin­ux GUI con­ven­tion. You’ll occa­sion­al­ly find it in Mac appli­ca­tions, though most­ly in those writ­ten by Microsoft. This is because in most Mac appli­ca­tions, the file-lev­el com­mands are only found on the menu bar and not in a win­dow tool­bar. A lot of web appli­ca­tions use a sim­i­lar icon, as well. []
  2. Pret­ty much all let­ters, num­bers, and oth­er sym­bols all had more con­crete mean­ing at one time. Take, for exam­ple, the octothor­pe/pound/hash/crosshatch/number sym­bol (#). Accord­ing to The Ele­ments of Typo­graph­ic Style, this was once used in car­tog­ra­phy to rep­re­sent a vil­lage. That is, it was a sym­bol for a town square sur­round­ed by eight fields. The fact that we have so many dif­fer­ent names for this sym­bol is indica­tive of its many mod­ern uses and that we have all but for­got­ten its orig­i­nal, more lit­er­al mean­ing. []
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Categorized as Geek

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

4 comments

  1. On the Octothor­pe: I had writ­ten this post actu­al­ly sev­er­al weeks pri­or to pub­lish­ing it. I did some research on the octothor­pe as an exam­ple of a map glyph becom­ing a com­mon sym­bol. How­ev­er, it turns out that this may very well be a com­plete myth and that some Bell Labs engi­neers just cre­at­ed it on the spot decades ago. Either way, has come to sym­bol­ize far more than it was ever intend­ed to (as have many characters).

  2. These past few months I have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty for immer­sion in char­ac­ter sym­bol rich Chi­na. The writ­ten lan­guage here is com­plete­ly sym­bols usu­al­ly mean­ing exact­ly what the char­ac­ter looks like. For exam­ple 凹 is con­vex. 凸 is concave. 

    Also learned of anoth­er type of sym­bol; this one made with the hand. When tea is poured it is polite and a ges­ture of thanks to tap the table with your index fin­ger as the tea is poured. This has an inter­est­ing development.

    Typ­i­cal­ly today you tap with your index fin­ger, which evolved from tap­ing with both your index fin­ger and mid­dle fin­ger, which evolved from tap­ping with the 2nd joint on the index and mid­dle fin­ger. This last method was used by var­i­ous emper­ors to say thanks. It resem­bles kneel­ing. So since the emper­or could clear­ly not kneel before his ser­vant and usu­al­ly did not even talk to them his fin­gers could do the kneel­ing and thank­ing for him.

    Why a com­put­er disk sym­bol or the # made me think of this we may nev­er fig­ure out. Buy the way some time ago I had to pur­chase a 3.5″ flop­py dri­ve to access a few old disks. It col­lects dust now. You can even still pur­chase 5.25″ drives.

  3. Reverse those sym­bols: 凹 is con­cave. 凸 is con­vex. Duh.

  4. I wrote a post last year about hav­ing to dig through some old 3.5″ flop­pies as part of our clean­ing. We had to bor­row a USB dri­ve from my father-in-law just to read them, as we haven’t owned any­thing with that kind of dri­ve in years.

    We’re also in trou­ble if we need to view a VHS tape, for that matter.

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