A friend sent me a video of Susan Kare this week.
She drew the first Mac icons in the 80s with like, 32 x 32 pixels to work with. A trash can. A small smiley computer. All drawn on graph paper one square at a time, and somehow still feel warm.
The first thing I thought of was a floppy disk.
It’s still here, thirty-something years later. Tap Save almost anywhere and there it is.. Suffice to say, I’m old enough to remember a real one >.>
Image via r/battlestations
90s kids know some version of this corner. The keyboard tray that slid out on wheels like three times before it broke. And somewhere in that desk, a drawer. THE floppy drawer.
Prince of Persia. Ken’s Labyrinth. A disk with DO NOT DELETE on it (still dunno what it was). Disk 4 of 12 for a Windows install.
You’d push one into the drive. It’d click, then whir. Occasionally, the dreaded “Abort, Retry, Fail?”
And when it worked, you’d eject it and put it back in the drawer. Safe.
Most people clicking that icon today have never seen one. And they don’t need to.
Cause somewhere along the way, the icon stopped meaning a piece of plastic. It started meaning “this is safe now”
To me, that is the real weight of an icon. Not what it shows but what it promises.
These days the symbol for AI is almost always a sparkle. It’s a pretty enough shape, but promises something very different. Not safe, not kept. Magic.
And magic is exciting, right up until you need to trust it.
The floppy disk earned its meaning. Years of people pressing the button and finding their work still there the next day. Trust built slowly, through nothing going wrong.
AI doesn’t have that history yet. There’s no object behind it, no little click, no drawer. Just a sparkle, asking to be trusted.
And I’m not quite ready to click it the way I once clicked Save.
Not yet.