We'll Always Have The Save Icon

July 3, 2024 11:57 AM

There were more variations of them than you realized. But now - 53 years after the IBM 23FD was first introduced, 41 years after Sony started selling a 3.5" version through HP and - after some corporate subterfuge that involved a Sony engineer hiding from Steve Jobs in a broom closet - Apple, 26 years after the first iMac shipped without one, 14 years after they were last manufactured and after two years of difficult legislative and technical upgrades, Japan has declared victory over the floppy disk.
posted by mhoye (49 comments total)

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posted by Faint of Butt at 12:02 PM on July 3

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posted by HearHere at 12:05 PM on July 3

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This also points out how hard it is to regulate organizational technology use well. A cautionary tale relevant to information security, also AI.
posted by humbug at 12:06 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

💾
posted by NotAYakk at 12:12 PM on July 3 [7 favorites]

[Dade airdrops garbage file to a skateboarding The Plague, who immediately hops in an Uber XL]
posted by phooky at 12:13 PM on July 3 [4 favorites]

some corporate subterfuge that involved a Sony engineer hiding from Steve Jobs in a broom closet

My immediate visualization.


💾 💀 👼
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:15 PM on July 3 [8 favorites]

Ugh this reminds me of an embarrassing moment when I was teaching something about user interface design and cracked a joke about replacing the little disk icon with a picture of Jesus.

The Christian students were all Not Amused and the only out gay guy dissolved in an embarrassed giggle fit and couldn't stop.

I suggested an icon of a whale, but that didn't seem to help the situation.
posted by Zumbador at 12:18 PM on July 3 [29 favorites]

The fax machine, on the other hand, seems to currently have Japan at a disadvantage.
posted by tclark at 12:24 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

Now it is officially time to start releasing indie albums on 5.25" floppy disks and having Floppy Disk Day at the local record store!
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:25 PM on July 3 [14 favorites]

I feel like that's something the 8-bit music crowd should've been doing on Bandcamp for a decade already.
posted by mykescipark at 12:30 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

Just great, now how am I going to play original Lode Runner? I suppose next they'll be coming for my monochromatic CRT monitor.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 12:49 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

A previously, already linked to bonehead's perfect comment on the matter
posted by bigendian at 12:53 PM on July 3

I started studying Japanese a couple of months ago, which means I'm learning the kanji, which means I spend a lot of time either looking up or trying to figure out (or just flat out make up for myself) a sort of pictographical etymology for the characters. (Wikipedia has some good examples of what I'm talking about.) But those characters changed over thousands of years to become abstractions of concepts.

The floppy disk icon has remained effectively unchanged and yet in my own lifetime has gone from a straight pictorial representation to only existing as an abstract symbol of "save". That's kind of wild.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:53 PM on July 3 [4 favorites]

Are they still using floppy disks for airplanes?
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:55 PM on July 3

I kinda like floppies, you can use stone-age tools to scan every bit of their surface and you can't hide multiple unauditable CPUs inside of them
posted by credulous at 1:18 PM on July 3 [5 favorites]

From the last link in the FPP

Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday

Ah yes, 2004, the year the 3.5” floppy towered over the computing landscape like a two-dimensional Ozymandias
posted by saturday_morning at 1:25 PM on July 3 [13 favorites]

I kinda miss the days of the music disk. An "album" of mods or s3ms or whatever, easily copyable to share with friends was a delightful thing. Of course, in those days having friends was almost mutually exclusive with listening to music on a computer or really doing much at all with a computer.
posted by wierdo at 1:28 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

The floppy disk icon ... has gone from a straight pictorial representation to only existing as an abstract symbol of "save".

More than once I've wondered when and how it will finally be replaced. Same goes for the phone icon.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:32 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

While moving I came across a stash of brand new Zip discs if anyone is interested. Also a ton of jewel cases, but who in their right mind would want those?
posted by TedW at 1:35 PM on July 3

The floppy disk icon ... has gone from a straight pictorial representation to only existing as an abstract symbol of "save".

Oh you mean the vending machine with a dispensed beverage icon?!?
posted by bigendian at 1:36 PM on July 3 [6 favorites]

During the 80’s at Apple, I accumulated a whole big bunch of 3.5 disks. I had a standard xerox paper box full of them. Sometime in the late 90’s I had a MacBook with a diskette drive and a SCSI port and I copied all the diskettes on to a hard drive. Then later I burned it all to a single CD labeled Box of Diskettes. Big box to little CD. I was somewhat startled by the shrinkage.

Before that, I got a freelance job teaching How to Use a Mac at a local copy shop in the Haight. After three lessons, I got a call from the copy shop guy. He said he had to talk to me. Now. So we met at a cafe. He said my language at these lessons are belittling to women. How? I asked. You use that word diskette, it’s insulting to women. My next thought was to tell him that I could say floppy disk, but that might be belittling to men. But I didn’t.
posted by njohnson23 at 1:42 PM on July 3 [6 favorites]

We're trying to get some intellectual property registerd here in Chile, including a video. We have to provide it on a VHS tape! Like, how???
posted by signal at 1:48 PM on July 3 [3 favorites]

5.25" or GTFO.
posted by Sphinx at 1:58 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

Hey! I started out with 8 inch floppies, which really were floppy!
posted by njohnson23 at 1:59 PM on July 3 [4 favorites]

My floppy journey began with 8" disks at work and ended when machines at work no longer accepted the 3.5" floppy - one of the latter was present in my shirt-pocket for many years, for easy data transfer between home and office.
posted by Rash at 2:01 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

I remember shopping for my first computer in 1984. I was leaning towards Apple, since we had Apple IIs in high school. (I could have bought a PC clone from Michael Dell; we even lived in the same dorm and my life might have been very different had we become buddies🤷🏼‍♂️). Although Macs were expensive, I had seen Lisa in action and thought GUI was the wave of the future. Plus at the time UT Austin’s campus bookstore was supposedly the largest Apple retailer in the world so was able to offer decent discounts. But to get to the relevance to the FPP, the Mac was relatively unique in using 3.5 inch floppies in a hard plastic enclosure, as opposed to 5.5 inch floppies in a flexible plastic enclosure. And so many salesmen (they were all men in those days, and I did a lot of research before spending more money than I spent on a car on a box of transistors) referred to the 3.5 discs as “hard discs”. Which they were not, but which was a clever bit of puffery to make them look a lot more technologically advanced than they were. But they definitely lasted a relatively long time in retrospect.
posted by TedW at 2:07 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

When I visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, they had a 5.25 floppy in one of the displays, pinned in place under glass, labeled, and catalogued, like it was a cuneiform tablet with the Epic of Gilgamesh on it.
posted by gimonca at 2:09 PM on July 3 [6 favorites]

During the 80’s at Apple, I accumulated a whole big bunch of 3.5 disks.

when I was in college, I did mail delivery for my dorm, and AOL sent a free disk to everyone once a week, enticing them to get AOL internet service. But they didn't send them to every actual address, they sent them to every single number between 1-500, which was the first and last dorm room numbers in the building, and we didn't even have rooms past 50. So we had stacks of AOL floppy disks for rooms 151-199, etc that could not be delivered. Most were returned or trashed, but we kept plenty, erased them, and used em for other stuff, including Mp3 trading. The next year, they switched to CDs and did the same thing. I had a lot of coasters then, or took them home and used them for target practice.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:16 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

I once used an old HP oscilloscope that we couldn't connect to the network because its version of Windows was so old it was a security risk. But it could save captures to a 3.5" disk. So where to get a disk? I went to this electronics surplus store that had been there forever and after a fruitless search asked an older guy behind a desk if they had any. He accessed his inventory control system (which means he sat and thought for a minute, going through decades of memories in his mind) then raised his finger and walked over to an aisle, reached in the back, and handed me a few disks.

So I was able to capture my results. Then I had to find an old PC in the lab that still had a floppy disk slot so I could get the data off the disk.

Both are long gone by now but it was an interesting adventure in ancient technology.

(One of my first jobs in high school was actually at a floppy disk factory, back when they were still in the US, working with mostly Filipino women who would tell me ghost stories while we worked).
posted by eye of newt at 2:32 PM on July 3 [14 favorites]

Before that, I got a freelance job teaching How to Use a Mac at a local copy shop in the Haight. After three lessons, I got a call from the copy shop guy. He said he had to talk to me. Now. So we met at a cafe. He said my language at these lessons are belittling to women. How? I asked. You use that word diskette, it’s insulting to women.

This is one of the most San Francisco stories about San Francisco I've ever heard.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:53 PM on July 3 [8 favorites]

That engineer in a broom closet story is the perfect example of Steve Jobs being an arrogant knob-end. Having to build a mini AppleII inside the Lisa just to make the Twiggy disks work because you didn't want to spend a few bob on a standard disk controller is so Apple it hurts.

Anyway, 3" disks were the best disks. I would say fight me, but you've already lost.
posted by scruss at 3:11 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

Post up if you’ve ever jammed a finger in the door of a floppy drive to slow the motor a bit so an iffy sector would read clean.
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:18 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

Ugh this reminds me of an embarrassing moment when I was teaching something about user interface design and cracked a joke about replacing the little disk icon with a picture of Jesus.

I once submitted a purchase request for a Screen Savior screensaver with the justification that it would save our screens and our souls but the godless heathens said nah.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:34 PM on July 3 [3 favorites]

One of the things that pissed me off about physical media formats is that manufacturers kept going it alone, looking for that hit and those sweet sweet royalties. 3.5" floppies were a standardized effort. They were a commodity item. It was $20 or whatever on the build and it was done. Compared to Iomega asking $200 for a ZIP drive? Come the fuck on. If I want to pay for overpriced drives and media I'll go MiniDisc which was a billion times cooler.

Also, fuck Sony for allowing Sony Music to dictate MiniDisc being limited trash in the '90s. I can't use the same discs for audio and data? I can't put audio and data on the same disc? Yeah they fixed a lot of the problems with Hi-MD but it was too little too late. Flash was taking off and it wasn't coming back but if Sony hadn't screwed that pooch it would have been a progressively evolving standard until flash memory was putting out 8GB drives for pennies.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:35 PM on July 3 [4 favorites]

Anyway, 3" disks were the best disks. I would say fight me, but you've already lost.

I had some contact with these on a friend's Amstrad. I never got the point of the design, they were longer than they were wide, so any advantage to the more compact size was mostly lost.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:36 PM on July 3

I kinda miss the days of the music disk.

The music disk is alive and well! Try The Beautiful Machine 2, Chipo Django 2, Chip Chop 17, Faker Bashing or Cecconoise depending on your preferred platform.
posted by offog at 3:37 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

It's such a tough thing when you've got an icon, a symbol of a past age (maybe a better age? Who can say?), with a history of having served us well enough for decades, but with really so little relevance to the modern world, and a tendency to make younger people.. well, let's say confused at best. So, replacement seems to be the only option, but replacement with ...? I don't see a consensus emerging. Maybe we're stuck with what we've got, like it or not.

Oh sorry wrong thread, this was supposed to be over in the latest US politics post.
posted by canisbonusest at 4:04 PM on July 3 [14 favorites]

I bought my first x86 machine by upgrading people’s computers to Windows. I forget exactly how many 3.5 floppies it took, I just remember carrying a box full of them in my backpack and sitting in front of the customers computer for hours inserting disk after disk.

I also can’t remember the exact hacky method I used to make copies of the windows install disks on my single drive Amiga. Insert original disk, load a chunk to memory, remove and insert destination disk to write the chunk to the disk. Repeat for hours.

Made enough money to buy a 286 with two floppy drives and a 20 MB hard drive.

I read so many books then while making money. Never felt so close to living in a Gibson story.

Every time I find a 3.5 in an old box I get an instant of whole body nostalgia for a cyberpunk future that never was.
posted by Dr. Curare at 4:37 PM on July 3 [7 favorites]

Post up if you’ve ever jammed a finger in the door of a floppy drive to slow the motor a bit so an iffy sector would read clean.

or if you ever used a hole punch on a 5.25" disk so you could write on the wrong side
posted by logicpunk at 4:51 PM on July 3 [8 favorites]

20 MB hard drive

Living large back in the day (and playing Larn, if you were me).
posted by mollweide at 4:58 PM on July 3 [2 favorites]

I was working with some younguns who didn't know you could just use a hole punch to render them unusable. They had been using a couple of external usb drives to work through a cabinet of nearly 2 thousand disks to erase.
posted by zenon at 8:07 PM on July 3

I knew they were just a fad! People are bound to come crawling back to my punch card emporium now!
posted by biogeo at 9:34 PM on July 3 [1 favorite]

The troppy disk is still going in some parts of Europe, though.
posted by Zarkonnen at 10:35 PM on July 3

I got trained on the 23FD in October 1973.
I can still remember the sound of it.
posted by MtDewd at 3:46 AM on July 4

Back in the 70s I was working on a new OS for a major semi-conductor company. When I start we had 4 8” single density floppy drives on out development systems. A few months later we got double density drives, which meant I didn’t have to swap disks as frequently when we were building the system.

Then we got hard drives. It was a two platter system with one platter removable. 7.5MB on each platter. We thought we were in heaven until we went to load all our source code on one of the drives and found that the OS we were using limited us to something like 255 files per drive.

And don’t get me started on six character dot three character file names.

It was always something back in those days.
posted by jvbthegolfer at 4:42 AM on July 4 [3 favorites]

You may be familiar with the 5¼" and 3½" disks, but how about the 3¼" flex diskette?

And grumpybear69, there is an active floppy music scene in which the entire album is compressed to fit on the 1.44 megabyte disk. I've been to a few release parties and the funny thing is that many of the purchasers don't have a way to play them, so they mostly collect them for the art work.

For extra fun, you can plug a USB floppy drive into your Android phone and the underlying Linux kernel will happily mount it as external storage.

One last fun floppy fact! Some magazines published programs on flexible vinyl records, which are sort of like a giant floppy disk without a case and that is read via audio rather than magnetic and I guess is nothing like a floppy.
posted by autopilot at 5:15 AM on July 4 [4 favorites]

they've become mythic on tumblr
posted by graywyvern at 6:47 AM on July 4

My email sig from those days said “It says insert disk 3, but only two will fit!”
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:39 PM on July 4 [3 favorites]

Post up if you’ve ever jammed a finger in the door of a floppy drive to slow the motor a bit so an iffy sector would read clean.

or if you ever used a hole punch on a 5.25" disk so you could write on the wrong side

No, but I used countless straightened paper clips in the secret hole to eject stuck floppies.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 6:47 PM on July 5 [1 favorite]