• Hal@piefed.nzEnglish
      12·
      9 days ago

      I was explaining to my kids about floppy disks, and mentioned the save icon. The what? The button you press to save. It just says “save” they said.

      I think they use the Google suite at school, and apparently the save button just says “save”. Although TBH I half expected them to not know of it because of auto-saving.

    • Kojichan@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 days ago

      They are trying to change those icons now, too. People dont recognize them so they use others.

      • TheKingBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        I haven’t seen that, any examples?

        I don’t why they’d change that either, just because they don’t know the origin, they still grew up knowing it meant “save.”

        • Kojichan@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 days ago

          I remember seeing a program that used something else once, and when I worked in web apps and websites, there was always a debate about what to use.

          A common one is a folder icon (or a tray) with a download arrow… DESPITE it being used to save locally. Same thing with a cloud with a down arrow.

          Some other programs used to use the icon for a hard disk, the three circular platters.

          If I remember the app, Ill give better examples of programs that use other things.

  • massive_bereavement@fedia.io
    62·
    9 days ago

    “And the bios sayeth unto the user: Come forth and insert disk 23 of 30. And they did so. When the needle of the drive tested the disk, it had become corrupted, verily.”

    • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      28·
      9 days ago

      “Thus the monkey of the isle demanded Disk 114 be inserteth. Yet there was no Disk 114 and much confusion was sewn.”

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.todayEnglish
      15·
      9 days ago

      Not joking but I did 1800 support for Windows 95 and at the end, right before 98, there was a constant problem with a specific floppy and people would like call us and we would try to send them a cd replacement but could send the fixed floppy. It was silly because it was the most common call for a bit. Like that batch of floppies all died at the same time

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    26·
    9 days ago

    I just need to pause and reflect on the level of commitment in that post. They started out strong, and just kept on going.

    Absolutely outstanding.

  • MissingGhost@lemmy.ml
    19·
    9 days ago

    It’s a Windows convention, but, if you are old enough, it was a DOS convention and a CP/M convention.

  • lime!@feddit.nu
    18·
    9 days ago

    i think even usb floppies show up as a:, don’t they? i’ve not used windows for a decade now, thankfully.

  • huquad@lemmy.mlBannedEnglish
    17·
    9 days ago

    But they were, all of them, deceived, for another drive was made.

  • tigerhawkvok@startrek.websiteEnglish
    16·
    8 days ago

    I mean I purchased an external floppy for my undergrad laptop as recently as… 2004… Oh shit that was 22 years ago… Fuck a kid born a year later can legally buy alcohol and a kid born then is graduating from undergraduate…

    When did I get old?

    • RobotsLeftHand@lemmy.world
      4·
      8 days ago

      I remember building a computer in 2004 and finally making the decision to not include a floppy drive since I had just been booting from the CD drive for the past couple of issues anyways.

      I was reminded of this several years later when I made the decision not to include a disk drive in my latest build.

  • egregiousRac@piefed.socialEnglish
    15·
    9 days ago

    Back in the XP era, I set a hard drive to B and random installers would refuse to target it because they insisted it was too small. Good times.

        • Kratzkopf@discuss.tchncs.de
          9·
          8 days ago

          I was convinced I had seen the spelling ‘disk’ before, so I looked it up and found this (new to me) and interesting distinction on wiktionary.

          In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc). For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise. Less commonly, disc is used for magnetic media (as in floppy disc and discette); similarly, disk is sometimes used for optical media, as in compact disk and optical disk.

          But also both forms seem to be usable for geometric disc shapes.

          • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
            2·
            8 days ago

            It’s probably a replication on our languages.

            For example, in Swedish… it’s spelled telefon, not telephone. I was trying to think of a word, where in Swedish, it’s a k whereas in English, it’s a c. Ah, yes - katten for cat, as in felix.

            Did you know that laser, as in laser disc, is likely from the Swedish word läser, which means to read.

            • Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works
              2·
              6 days ago

              LASER is actually an acronym “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”

              But i have no idea if there was any swedish influence on the people who came up with name

  • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    8 days ago

    People talk about the legacy of the floppy disk (mid-eighties to mid-aughts) being used as a save icon, but drive letters are even more extreme - and absurd - than that.

    CP/M came out in 1974 and introduced drive letters A: and B: for floppy drives, and Microsoft copied that for DOS and the early DOS-based versions of Windows. Microsoft finally killed off the DOS lineage with Windows Me in 2000, so that was 26 years of drive letters actually being part of the OS’ architecture.

    Windows NT came out in 1993 - 19 years after CP/M - and didn’t use drive letters but for the sake of backwards compatibility and familiarity it would emulate them. All versions of Windows since 2000 are based on NT. So we had 26 years of drive letters being needed, and 33 years of faking it for consistency.

      • one_old_coder@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        9 days ago

        A: had the DOS used to boot the computer, B: had the application. There was no C:. Then 5.25 floppies died and most people didn’t see the need for a second 3.5 drive, hence A: and B: