But that’s not the origin of the computer keyboard: it came from the keyboards of musical instruments, such as the piano or organ. That was extended to the typewriter, and to the computer.
We’ll also be dailing cell phones for many many years into the future, even though just about zero* percent of all cell phones ever built don’t/didn’t have a dial.
Somebody did build a dial cellphone as a novelty. I saw pix.
How about the Save icon being a 3.5" floppy disk?
There are other alternatives, but that one became ensconced into MS Office and will probably be in use forever.
We used to use rubber cement.
The monstrous Velox machines, the tiny pieces of rule that would stick to your shoes . . .
Like cc. for carbon copy.
In primary school in the US in the 1980’s I literally cut-and-pasted with scissors and glue to paste pictures on reports and whatnot. Do kids not do this anymore?
I’m curious about the floppy disk analogy for saving - I wonder how long that is going to stay around, now that it has been several years since the “death” of the floppy disk?
Think about phones. What do you call it when you enter a number onto the keypad? Did you say dialing? When was the last time you literally “dialed” a phone number on a rotary dial keypad?
MS Word has a tool which allows you to cut-and-copy multiple items, then dump them all out in one paste. It’s called “the spike” after the old-fashioned desktop paper spike.
We also get metaphor-remixes like “dialpad” – a pad of dials? What?
Or, like beowulff said, “desktop wallpaper”. Heh.
Hell, what about “computer”? How often do *you *use the darned thing to add up a couple of numbers or whatever?
Originally, a ‘computer’ was a person who got paid to do arithmetic. This meant that back in the Old Days (up through the 1950s at least) computer names would often end in -AC (JOHNNIAC, ILLIAC, SILLIAC, etc.) for ‘Automatic Computer’. (Also, individual computers were named; mass-production of computers would come a bit later, and along with it the ability to do things like use one piece of software on more than one piece of hardware.)
The original human computers not only had their jobs taken away, but their job title was used to name the machines that did it. I wonder how many of them got jobs as keypunch operators.
For what it’s worth, Ubuntu uses a hard drive for the save icon. Not that it isn’t similarly doomed to obsolescence, just not as quickly as 1.44MB floppies.
Maybe we should just doctor the records to say that the appearance of 3.5" floppies was designed in homage to the “save” symbol.
(I can [del]bullshit up[/del] concoct a story for where the “save” glyph came from in the first place, but I’ll need a little time.)
Well, considering that it’s been a hundred years or so since gas lighting went the way of the dodo, and we still turn on and off the lights, I’d say it could take a while before the term “dial” gets updated.
nevermind
I only twigged a few years ago, despite them being so blatantly obvious, are the origins of aeronautical terms:
Airline
Airport
Aircraft
Flight Captain
Flight Crew
Flight Steward
Cabin
Hold
Rudder
Cruising altitude
Cockpit (“The term is most likely related to the sailing term for the coxswain’s station in a Royal Navy ship, and later the location of the ship’s rudder controls.” - Wikipedia)
And probably many many more I can’t think of at the moment.
What about the word “phone” itself? The “telephone” function is becoming less and less important, as more different functions are added.
early electrical switches for use in home illumination were rotary switches.
My ex-union-printer friend (now a jazz guitarist) used to say that the typesetters’ union gave everyone a spelling, reading and writing test, and…
…the top 20% flunked.