You don’t really notice this, but most iconic representations of actions and objects are based on objects from ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more. Scott Hanselman noticed this.
One of the funnier things from John Gruber’s blog was his ongoing crusade against the floppy-disk icon used to denote the Save action, which concluded with this post promoting the idea of doing away with the icon and saving altogether. (Ironically, when he got his wish, he had trouble coping.) Apparantly lost on him was that even his dear iPhone, iPad and Macs (along with almost every other device) also used icons based on obsolete items. The phone icon of an iPhone is a curved handset. Voice mail is represented by a spool of audio-cassette tape. Electronic mail, and maybe other types of instant messaging is represented by pictures of envelopes, postage stamps or even outdoor free-standing mailbox. You’ll see a Larry King Live or game-show host microphone to represent audio input of most stripes. There are no gears in an iPad, an iPhone or a laptop computer (aside for perhaps the mechnical hard drive in many of the latter), but that is Apple’s representation for altering the settings in a control panel.
And about control panels, what we call that stuff betray that these concepts predated the iPhone. With machines, there once was a whole panel where the major controls of the device resided. Or dialing a phone number, a phrase still used even though dials disappeared from phones in the 1970s or 80s. Speaking of dials, Tiny Toon Adventures exhorted people to not “touch that dial”, even though dials disappeared from televisions (and most radios for that matter) roughly around the same time.
Icongraphy and pictography are very much like languages and as such the pictures, like words in languages, can grow on and outlive the the initial physical object or idea that inspired it. We still refer to lunacy even though we really don’t think the moon drives people crazy. We don’t think this day of the week, Sunday, has any closer connection to the sun than the other days. Likewise, despite decades of women wearing jeans without controversy and the continued existance of Scotsmen in kilts, pictograms will still distinguish men and women by placing the woman in a skirt/dress and the man in pants. Or to be much more cryptic, Venus’ hand mirror (♀) and Mars’ shield and spear (♂) could be used instead, though fewer men will ever make use of a spear while many do make use of hand mirrors.
In other words, it’s not really that big of a deal we still save to floppy. We are writing commentary about it using pictures even older than that whose original physical world meaning has long been lost. I am, of course, referring to these letters which have been put together in the words that populate this post and the posts I have linked to.