And the symbol for video is a film strip. I guess we could change the symbols for everything into little pictures of hard drives, but that seems counterintuitive.
Exactly. Hard drives will also be obselete in the not too distant future, and a picture of a nand chip isn’t the most descriptive. I think we should keep the film strip, since that’s how film began, and these reels of film can only be used for video so you know what the icon means even if you have never seen the icon before.
Snakes have been associated with medicine since the Greek myth of Asclepius, and we use it in modern hospitals today, so I don’t think the floppy disk save icon will need to change.
It used to be that different kinds of information were stored on very different media: paper for text, canvas for paintings, film strips for photographs and video, tape and vinyl records for audio, floppy disks for computer files, and so on. That’s where the icons come from.
On the other hand, now that high-capacity hard disks and flash memory exist, many different kinds of information can be and often are stored on the same device. You can’t easily tell what kind of information is stored on it just by looking at it; you have to actually read it.
And the symbol for video is a film strip. I guess we could change the symbols for everything into little pictures of hard drives, but that seems counterintuitive.
Exactly. Hard drives will also be obselete in the not too distant future, and a picture of a nand chip isn’t the most descriptive. I think we should keep the film strip, since that’s how film began, and these reels of film can only be used for video so you know what the icon means even if you have never seen the icon before.
Snakes have been associated with medicine since the Greek myth of Asclepius, and we use it in modern hospitals today, so I don’t think the floppy disk save icon will need to change.
That raises a mildly interesting point.
It used to be that different kinds of information were stored on very different media: paper for text, canvas for paintings, film strips for photographs and video, tape and vinyl records for audio, floppy disks for computer files, and so on. That’s where the icons come from.
On the other hand, now that high-capacity hard disks and flash memory exist, many different kinds of information can be and often are stored on the same device. You can’t easily tell what kind of information is stored on it just by looking at it; you have to actually read it.