Last month in Computer Weekly magazine, a reader suggested that as floppy disks are now all but obsolete, it was time to consider updating the Save icon commonly used in most graphical software packages. Another reader has written back with the observation that old things are more recognisable than new:
"Think of road signs. They need to be universally recognisable, but the sign for a speed camera is for an old-fashioned concertina-type camera of the type most people under 50 would only have seen in museums and books. Equally, the sign for a railway crossing shows a really old-style steam train."
I think this is a very perceptive comment and I'm left wondering about its wider significance. How visually accurate does a symbol have to be? How long does a technology take to become mass-market? Does disuse really mean obsolescence? Is there as much difference between the old and the new as we really think?
This vaguely reminds me of something that occurred to me the other day. Thirty years ago, when my grandparents talked about the "wireless" I wondered why they didn't call it a radio like everyone else. The word seemed impossibly archaic. Everyone knew that radio didn't have wires, it was as bizarre as calling the freezer a "heatless".
For similar reasons, cable television seemed a very weird concept in the late 1970s. I remember houses with the Rediffusion service, with their weird click-switch method of channel selection. I wondered why they couldn't get "wireless" TV like everyone else, but then again we rented our TV set so I surmised that maybe they rented their programmes as well.
Now, of course, "wireless" has become a mainstream data technology and cable TV is perfectly commonplace as an alternative to satellite. Our old TV set, with its four cylindrical channel selection buttons - only one of which could be pressed at any time and the fourth of which was as yet unused - would probably now be a museum piece.
Those buttons live on in the virtual world, however, albeit with what in my mind is always the wrong name.
Posted by Hg on Wednesday 05 July 2006 at 09:49.
Received 1 comments so far.
I noticed a couple of young relatives had toy dial phones when they were toddlers and I commented on howold-fashioned they were. These young relatives have just done their A-Levels.
Meanwhile young relative, vintage 2005, chats into the TV remote control and has a telephone dial on his Activity Centre...!
And we still "dial the number". I think - or has that fallen into archaism?
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