Last week I had to explain to my students that the "save symbol" wasn't just some random glyph but that it represented a floppy disk, an object that you would once save a file on. Long ago. In the olden days.
If I told them after about how things were before we invented fire I think they would have believed I was there for that one too.
@futurebird True! I remember the old floppies! I used to have some when I got my 1st computer!
@cub80_appleby @futurebird except that one (3.5") isn't particularly floppy on the outside, and you should not crack open the delicious shell 😉
@drchaos @cub80_appleby @futurebird there were some brands for which I was able to figure out how to pop open the plastic case with a metal nail file so I could get a disk out of a damaged case and put it in a good case to try to rescue some data off it. But other brands I couldn't figure out how to do it without breaking the plastic. Mostly it was much easier to just copy stuff onto 3 or 4 floppies for backup purposes, though that required some foresight and prior planning.
@llewelly @drchaos @cub80_appleby
need to keep an eye on this one in the computer room
@futurebird @drchaos @cub80_appleby I was definitely not the kid with boot and root floppies and installing linux on any unattended computer. (Though in retrospect, I will admit there are times when I regret not being that kind of person, but I'm not.)
Nov 13, 2026, 11:46 AM@futurebird @spacehobo
I once had to explain to somebody that the icon that some programming software had for "compiling" or somesuch was not a pie knife, but actually a trowel.
It was, to be fair, a short-lived icon. Not really very clear, though it did make sense if you understood what it was.
As a child I didn't understand that this was a paint bucket. I think it was just too stylized.
I thought it was a graduation hat.
@futurebird @spacehobo lighting fire to cook the dinosaur you hunted, correct?
At least that's what we did, back in the good old days, when you had a 1% chance of dying during childbirth...
@futurebird @spacehobo One of the kids mentioned a classmate, on seeing a (real) floppy, said "Cool! it's a 3D printed version of the SAVE logo on the computer!"
@futurebird @spacehobo
I sometimes had to tell the children at work "no, I'm not older than dirt but I knew the guy that invented it".😁