For real though, my friend is a professor, and one of her students asked her during office hours why she had 3d printed a bunch of the save icons and kept them on her desk.
In 2009, I was at university, majoring in physics. The curriculum for experimental physics contained a series of lab courses. One of these used an old-but-reliable specialized measuring device for which only a DOS driver was available. (The DOS box next to it probably came with the device.) It was still working flawlessly, but of course, DOS can only write to floppy disks.
This wasn't a problem before because the result data could just be copied to a USB drive using one of the several workstations in the experimental physics department. However, when I did the lab course, the dept had been outfitted with all-new workstations just a few days prior. And of course the new workstations did not have floppy disk drives anymore. It took the instructor a while to locate a PC that still had one.
Well yeah, but I was talking about getting data off the system onto my own notebook (for the purpose of writing the lab course report). A 90s-era hard drive would be even more impractical for this purpose than a floppy disk.
I could easily seeing that happen. Watching my kid grow up, it's actually pretty interesting to see how frequently stuff like this occurs.
- To those who were around when the icon was created, the floppy disk is associated with storing a version of a file. So the action that occurs when pressing the icon can be intuited via transference. To those who have no knowledge of a floppy disk (like younger people), it's purely idiomatic and that the icon represents saving the current state of a file is an idiomatic definition that needs to be committed to memory by rote.
- "Hanging up the phone" (and it's associated icon of a horizontally-placed or forward-tilted handset) is also decoupled from the current reality of disconnecting a phone call. When she finally made her confusion known, we had to explain to her that it meant to end the call (i.e. press the red button on the screen). Before that, she was really confused and thought we were trying to tell her to do something weird with the charging cable (what else would she "hang" it from?).
- # is an incredibly common symbol nowadays. It's referred to as a hashtag. Not a pound symbol, number symbol, or even a hash symbol. But "hashtag selfie" is said in speech to represent the hashtag "#selfie". "Press pound" or "Press the pound key" is not an intuitive instruction to a huge swath of younger people or non-native speakers that picked up a lot of their vocabulary from modern movies/tv/Youtube.
- Alarm clock, stopwatch, and timer icons also tend to be the subject of rote memorization rather than transference learning, at least earlier in life. Representative objects are around (either sold as a retro analog device, TV/movies, grandparents, etc), but not nearly ubiquitous enough to have exposure to the device before the icon.
The list goes on. It's far more common than you'd think for iconographic elements and instructions to be entirely intuitive to those that understand the origins of the icons, while being purely idiomatic and non-intuitive to others.
For someone who has only ever been exposed to a floppy disk in the form of a save icon, assuming it's a 3D printed icon or novelty toy/paperweight/thing is a pretty logical conclusion. Even more so as older movies get phased out of common circulation, so they don't even get indirect exposure that way.
I think her student was messing with her, even young kids know what floppies are thanks to the "3d printed save button" meme :-P
I mean, think about it: many people who were born in the 80s and 90s know about phonographs despite them being long obsolete by that point, thanks to the references in cartoons, movies and other forms of media they consumed as children.
I mean, you can still go to a record store, and due to the analog nature of the stored audio, and the fact that you have to rebuy albums to format shift for the vast majority of people, meant that vinyl records far outlived the time they were technically required. I listened to a vinyl album last week; when was the last time you saw, much less used, a floppy disk? Do you think it's crazy out there that large swathes gen z legitimately has never seen one?
With phonograph i mean this [0], not any (modern) record player. It might be a language/region thing, but at least i understand "phonograph" (and "gramophone") to be the antique mechanical record players with the large metal horn.
> it was IBM's 1973 introduction of the 3740 data entry system[24] that began the establishment of floppy disks, called by IBM the "Diskette 1", as an industry standard for information interchange. The formatted diskette for this system stored 242,944 bytes
And then the response:
"You maintain a what driver?"