It’s interesting how that precedent happened though.
30 years ago saving something basically involved taking a floppy, putting it into the floppy drive, and then hitting a “save” button. That was often because computers didn’t even have a hard drive. And, when they did have a hard drive, having your files on a floppy drive was basically the only way to get them onto another computer. So, because of that, a floppy drive was pretty universally recognized as a place where you saved files.
In the time since then, saving to a hard drive became more common. But, it’s hard to use a hard drive as an image for “save” because only computer geeks know what a hard drive actually looks like. Even if you could get people to recognize a hard drive icon it’s also ambiguous because you use your hard drive for many other things other than saving. Finally, it’s also less necessary to put the save files on external media, because you can email them, upload them, save to the cloud, etc.
The only physical media where people still save things is USB thumb drives. So, you could put in an image of a USB thumb drive, which more people would recognize, but that’s more ambiguous because people only save files to a thumb drive in certain specific cases. It’s also harder because there’s not really a globally recognized thumb drive image. All floppy drives had to look more or less identical because of the constraints of the disk drive system. But, USB drives only have to have the USB part in common – and in some cases that’s hideable or retractable.
It’s interesting how that precedent happened though.
30 years ago saving something basically involved taking a floppy, putting it into the floppy drive, and then hitting a “save” button. That was often because computers didn’t even have a hard drive. And, when they did have a hard drive, having your files on a floppy drive was basically the only way to get them onto another computer. So, because of that, a floppy drive was pretty universally recognized as a place where you saved files.
In the time since then, saving to a hard drive became more common. But, it’s hard to use a hard drive as an image for “save” because only computer geeks know what a hard drive actually looks like. Even if you could get people to recognize a hard drive icon it’s also ambiguous because you use your hard drive for many other things other than saving. Finally, it’s also less necessary to put the save files on external media, because you can email them, upload them, save to the cloud, etc.
The only physical media where people still save things is USB thumb drives. So, you could put in an image of a USB thumb drive, which more people would recognize, but that’s more ambiguous because people only save files to a thumb drive in certain specific cases. It’s also harder because there’s not really a globally recognized thumb drive image. All floppy drives had to look more or less identical because of the constraints of the disk drive system. But, USB drives only have to have the USB part in common – and in some cases that’s hideable or retractable.