SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday December 20 2016, @10:22AM
I have used VMS, and the fact that it was unable to distinguish (because it didn't even try) between an old version that was worth archiving, and an old version that should be binned, convinced me once and for all that it was an anti-feature, more than a feature.
For me it was using VAX C and discovering that the regular files created by the standard i/o library were incompatible with the "record-based" files created by every other VMS application... The VMS devs never did get the message that a file system wasn't meant to be a DBMS (probably the same folk who later tried to replace the Windows file system with a relational database).