Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.
Compare it to the things that came before and after:
Punch Cards
Magnetic tapes
8 and 5.25 inch floppies in flexible sleeves
3.5 inch diskettes
CDs
USB drives
Memory Cards
Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.
Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.
3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.
I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.
Aside from it being a decent icon, the original 3.5 inch floppy actually had amazing ergonomics.
Compare it to the things that came before and after:
Punch cards are fragile, even if you could somehow change them so they could hold gigabytes of data, cardstock is inherently not ideal. Magnetic tape can get dirty, it can stretch, etc. Flexible floppies have an open window so they can get scratched, get dust in them, etc.
Skip forward to CDs and you have something much more fragile that can easily get scratched. Then after that there are USB sticks that are pretty good, but because the part you plug in has to be able to make electrical contact with the USB port it can get dirty or bent or something. Often there’s a cap you have to take off then have to avoid losing. Or the plug part can be retracted, but that has to be done manually. They’re also all different sizes and shapes, so you can’t have a standard sized box to store them neatly. Plus there’s the notorious issue of trying to plug it in upside down. Finally memory cards. They’re small and easy to lose, they’re fairly fragile, and they also can be plugged in upside down.
3.5 inch floppies were a good size. They were big enough to be hard to lose, but small enough to be easily carried. They were nice and thin so you could have a stack of them. Because they were a standard size and shape you could have a storage box to contain a lot of them. They had a dust cover to protect the sensitive bits, and it moved aside automatically when you put the disk into the drive. They had a very obvious top side, so it was hard to put them in the wrong way, unless you had the drive mounted vertically which wasn’t that common.
I would hope that eventually if there’s another removable medium for storage, that it has a lot in common with those 3.5 inch diskettes.
someone’s got a hardon for a floppy