Floppy Discs Finally Get the Axe – What This Means for Saving Your Stuff
The end of an era is upon us: floppy discs will no longer be manufactured as of March 2011. Sony, the last real manufacturer of this lovable but decidedly antiquated storage form announced this week that they’ll be halting sales in Japan (the last real market for it), and have already begun shuttering their international sales in all but a few countries.
This announcement really doesn’t affect most of us individual users, as computers these days don’t even ship with floppy drives (Curse you Apple!), but tech blogs around the country (see: cnet, crunchgear, and NYTimes techblog as examples) lit up as geeks everywhere waxed nostalgic about the good old days when awesome games like Oregon Trail and Number Munchers loaded off of 3.5 inchers and every kid was assigned their own disc in computer class…ah those were the days. (Oh okay fine – that was me in the kitchen the other day but still! Oregon Trail RULED!)
Nostalgia aside, what really interested me was that in the wake of Sony’s announcement, debate immediately sprung up about what this would mean for the disc’s ubiquitous role as the “save” icon. For more than two decades, this widely recognized icon has been widely used across all types of software and even on the internet, even as the discs themselves became more and more obsolete. So now that they’re (soon to be) gone forever, where does that leave the icon? Will it remain a legacy that we’ll need to explain to our kids, like barber poles and the Rod of Asclepius on doctors’ doors? Or do we update it to represent what “saving” will mean in the future.
If I’ve lost you with “what will saving mean in the future,” think about this: People are getting increasingly mobile (laptops, then smartphones and now tablets) and there will be increasing demand to access to all of their data regardless of where they are or what hardware they’re on. Meaning, no more conversations like: “Hey! I have this awesome thing to show you….oh wait it’s on my work computer. Guess I’ll send it Monday?” Instead ubergeeks are thinking of things like cloud computing – where your data is backed up online and is accessible anywhere on any device – as the new way to save and store data. Because we’re no longer technically saving to hardware, the idea of a new save icon, complete with arrow and cloud, seems more apropos than an old fashion disc.
Others discuss the idea that as our software becomes more agile, we’ll move to more dynamic approaches to saving, very similar to autosaves currently performed by programs like Google Docs. Some people even go so far as to imagine an SVN (subversion) system built into every software type, where micro-changes are recorded by the computer in real time, allowing users to go back to old data the way the “Undo” button in Microsoft Word lets us erase unwanted actions. In this scenario, the save button would be obsolete, since the action would be an automatic response by the computer.
While I do think these either of these options are still a ways off, it’s definitely interesting to see how art, the advancement of technology and user experience collide.
