Modern legacy: icons

Although modern technology currently moves forward at a more rapid pace than ever before, there are still plenty of legacy solutions that are resilient enough to stand the test of time. Like digital equivalents of living fossils, they have managed to survive the disruptive effect of technological innovation and still thrive in highly modern IT-environments.

In this series, we will take a closer look at some of these technological dinosaurs that are still present in our modern times. In this article we’re going to focus on anachronistic icons that use symbols of an almost long forgotten technological past to describe modern software features.

Floppy disks and ‘Save’

If there is one piece of IT technology that deserves a prominent place in the museum of obsolete media, it’s the floppy disk. In the eighties and nineties, the offices and living rooms of IT professionals and even enthusiastic IT hobbyists used to be littered with these thin, flexible disks that were sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier. It didn’t matter if you wanted to store the fruits of your hard labor, play a video game or install the latest version of WordPerfect on your bulky PC: the floppy disk was always your best and most reliable buddy.

Good luck if you want to explain to present-day youngsters what a floppy disk actually was and how storage media with a maximum capacity of only a couple of MB’s sufficed to satisfy most of your daily IT needs. Yet, in most modern software applications the floppy disk is still the omnipresent icon that displays the ‘Save’ functionality. Apparently, IT professionals and developers also harbor nostalgic feelings every now and then.

Film stocks and camera apps

Very few photographers still work with analog film. It’s costly (remember using a whole roll of film and getting only two or three sharp and showable images at the end of the day) and labor-intensive, whilst digital cameras have made giant leaps forward when it comes to image quality. Although smartphones are hardly marvels of photographic refinery, the best modern in-phone cameras blow many high-end cameras from the analogical age out of the water.

Although digital phone cameras, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras don’t use film stock anymore, they still sport the symbol of this legacy technology to display the in-device photo albums or galleries.

Mailbox icons and email

Email has not completely replaced traditional “snail mail” but has played an important role in the decline of the number of postcards and handwritten letters that we send. Although email has nothing to do with the romantic picture of physical post offices, envelopes and heavy postbags, we still use the icon of an envelope to indicate the service on your desktop.

Old symbols in a new world

As you can see, even in the dynamic and very beta-centered world of modern IT technology we still cherish the familiar emblems of days gone by. There might not be a lot of room for film stocks, floppy disks or physical mail anymore in many real-world settings, but in cyberspace these legacy solutions are still very much alive in a symbolic way!

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