This morning I was signing some forms in Adobe Acrobat, and I noticed that the icon I clicked on to do so was a fountain pen nib. Made me wonder, how many computer users under 40 have ever even SEEN a fountain pen?
Of course there are the standard file cabinets/folders which have less and less relevance, and the snail mail envelope for email. What is your suggestion for the most archaic widely used computer icon, and what do you propose to replace it?
Floppy disks (for the “save” icon) are a lot more recent than nib fountain pens… but they’re still much more obsolete. A fountain pen will still do the job it was made to do, and you might still occasionally see one used by an aficionado (or, possibly, a ballpoint pen constructed to resemble a fountain pen). Likewise, file cabinets and paper envelopes are now seen less often than they used to be, but they’re still around, and still used.
But nobody ever uses floppy disks for anything any more, and even if you wanted to, there’s nowhere that you could use them. One could, I suppose, make a USB drive that resembled one, similar to the ballpoint pens that resemble nib pens, but that would be a lot more bulky and less convenient than a normal USB drive shape.
There’s a library near me that, some decades back, decided they needed an “up-to-date” and “modern” logo, and changed their logo to a book with its cover replaced by a floppy disk. Nowadays, the book part of it is still as up-to-date as ever, but the disk, not so much.
That’s a great one. I get a kick out of it when I watch old TV shows, ad the characters hold up a 5" floppy, going on about its capacity! 
If we’re talking what’s the most archaic, probably the floppy disk icon to “save”. I don’t think I’ve saved anything to a floppy since the 20th century. The last time I installed an FD was 2005. It was already obsolete at that point, but out of old habit I like to have as many available system boot options as possible.
But… does anything really need reworking? Icons take on a life of their own as they fall into common use. I would argue that the envelope icon as a signifier of email has now surpassed its significance as a signifier of paper mail. When my kids first used a paper envelope they noticed “cute, they folded it to look like the mail symbol.”
I don’t think there are many people who look at an icon and say “hmmm, unfamiliar icon… I’ll have to figure out what real-world object this represents, and then guess what the metaphor is.” You just learn which button does which thing, and the location of the button might be more important than the icon.
There are icons on my computer that I have no idea what object they depict or what metaphor they represent, but I’d be mad if someone changed them, because they help me remember what’s what.
USB floppy drives are a thing.. I no longer have any hoarded legacy media that needs to be retrieved from floppy… I think I did that final housecleaning around 2015 or so… but lots of people do.
I do miss the days when one could near-instantly create a system boot disk that would fit on a 1.44MB floppy. Nowadays even a system as small as Puppy Linux weighs in at ~300MB.
Symbols take on a life of their own and it’s irrelevant if the icon no longer shows something that’s obsolete. Maybe no one knows what a floppy disk is, but everyone knows the symbol means “save.”
You don’t need to know the etymology or origin of something to understand its meaning.
…and I think if you were going to replace it, the issue would not be whether it accurately represents the hardware involved, but whether there is some other equally distinctive representation. I can’t think of any storage hardware that’s as distinctive as a floppy disk. Perhaps the strongest candidate to replace the floppy disk will be the cloud symbol, which is very distinctive - but that will be more a function of local storage becoming obsolete.
I agree both that the floppy disk is the most obsolete icon, and that it’s not obvious what to replace it with. The fountain pen was archaic when it was selected, and was picked nonetheless because it’s an iconic image, and clearly conveys its meaning. I’ve seen software that uses a quill pen, which hasn’t been in use in anyone’s lifetime, except as a throwback item, but I daresay most everyone who uses a computer can tell what it means.
I suppose a life ring would be possible, but few have actually seen one these days, either.
I agree with this, but it’s still an interesting discussion to have.
It’s probably not as good an example as others mentioned in this thread, but the “phone” icon (i.e. what you’d use to actually make calls from your smartphone) is shaped like the kind of telephone handset that is becoming increasingly uncommon (though something like them still exists on desktop phones used in businesses).
What fascinates me is that we’re seeing the development in real time of a new pictographic writing system.
Last I saw, OpenOffice products replaced the floppy-disk “save” icon with a picture of a hard-drive enclosure (a similar icon is used in Mac’s Finder for a drive). It’s accurate, maybe, but distinctive it’s not: It’s basically just a box.
Similarly, one often sees a key used as an icon, but it’s usually a ward key, not a tumbler key. Ward keys haven’t been seriously used for about as long as fountain pens, but they’re likewise distinctive and easy to depict even in low detail.
Let’s see, my first choice was the floppy icon. That got mentioned right off as well as the phone icon on a cell phone (which doesn’t look like it at all). So the next most common on cell phones would be the camera icon. Yeah, a lot of people never see a camera front that looks like that at all.
Others might include the (analog) clock icon. But you can set the time in some places to be displayed in analog so that’s not dead yet. Then there’s the flashlight icon that’s moving towards obsolescence among some people.
You could find many examples like that, but the question would always come down to - what are the options to replace it? Modern phones are just rectangles. Even if you had a highly detailed icon of an iPhone, it wouldn’t be clear that its purpose is to make a voice call, because that’s not even the main use of an iPhone anymore. What would be a modernized faithful representation of the concept of “voice call?”
A similar situation exists in Chinese characters. Many of them are stylized pictures of objects that are no longer in common use, but they’re still useful because they’re not the object, they’re just a hook to hang the meaning on.
Not exclusive to computers, but the common symbols for movies, a reel of film or a frame with sprocket holes on the sides, are almost (but not entirely) obsolete, both in terms of how motion pictures are captured and projected. Likewise, the popular icon for TV, a CRT set with rabbit ears.
But as with the other symbols mentioned above, what simple iconic images of modern tech could convey the concepts of movies or TV shows (the distinctions between which are increasingly blurry, anyway)?
Yeah. This. But it fascinates me as an unfolding tragedy. We communicate so much by typing – I’m doing it right this second! – and yet in parallel we are creating this incompatible pictographic writing system that cannot be typed. And so often, I can’t figure out what the hell they are talking about! I did much of my windowing system computer usage, early on, in the SunView user interface on Sun workstations, and it wasn’t unusual to crash the system generating a core dump file. This got an icon imitating an apple core. Now when I see an hourglass, I see it first as a core dump file.
I knew we were headed for trouble about 30 years ago when I bought a temperature controlled recirculating bath, and it had pictographic buttons. The pictograph meaning “reset the automatic over-temperature shutdown” took me a long time to figure out – not the least because the pictographs can’t be looked up the way text can.
I think the success of alphabetic written language speaks for itself, and I vote we don’t replace it.
Accurate for older computers. More and more computers are now coming without conventionally shaped drives and instead going to M.2 format storage (or other soldered on storage). Also, a lot of data is saved directly to some version of cloud storage now.
Actually, more and more, they can be typed.
I typed all of those with my 
Yeah, I was going to say I’ve seen icons like this more and more often. Which I think either means ‘save to cloud’ or ‘impregnate tribble’:
I thought they were born pregnant? No need to impregnate…