That little square symbol you tap to save a file is actually a picture of a “floppy disk” - a piece of computer storage almost nobody under 25 has ever touched. Floppies were thin magnetic discs inside a hard plastic shell. You slid them into a slot on your computer like loading a cartridge.
The most common floppy, the 3.5-inch version, held about 1.44 megabytes. That sounds like nothing now - a single photo from your phone is usually three or four megabytes. A whole computer program in the 1990s might come on ten or twenty floppies, and you’d swap them one by one.
The last big factory making floppies shut down in 2010. But the icon hung around because everyone recognises what it means: “save your work.” A whole generation now knows the symbol without ever knowing the thing it shows. That’s quite a piece of digital history living in plain sight.
