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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the my-floppy-drive-still-works dept.

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 The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone.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?


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:44PM (#443915)

    I started word processing on a Z-80 CP/M system, with an Emacs/Scribe offshoot called Mince/Scribble, later integrated as FinalWordII then sold to Borland and renamed Sprint. It opened a "swap file" on disk when it started and it was possible to set the time increment for fast incremental saves to the swap file. If something crashed, there was "FWRecover" which could unscramble the swap file (I believe pointers to short chunks of text) and restore the session including multiple editing buffers. Even on old, unreliable hardware, I don't think I ever lost more than a few seconds of typing.

    Shutting down and restarting up again put me where I was before, state of editing buffers all saved in the swap file. When I was at a suitable stopping point, then I would "save' to keep a good copy (yes, this was actually "overwrite").

    Moving to MS-Dos and "office suites" was demanded by customers for interchangeability, but I've always felt I lost a lot when moving away from FinalWordII.

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