At a recent TechNet evening that I hosted with my pal Darren Strange one member of the audience pointed out the absurdity of Microsoft using a floppy disk as the icon for 'Save'. That got a big laugh and he's right; it is pretty daft that we still associate a floppy disk with the File>Save command.

But it's still there, even in our brand new 2007 Office System user interface, that hopelessly out-dated 3.5inch 1.44MB floppy disk

Ye Olde 3.5 Inch Floppy Diskette

That got me thinking about what else we could use. Although a floppy disk visual has become synonymous with saving a file, do we have the same associations in our minds for USB sticks, hard disk drive icons, or DVDs? For my money, nothing comes close to the otherwise-forgotten floppy diskette.

Very often symbols with a solid historical backbone are the most powerful and timeless. Don't believe me? Here's a few I could think of that have also stood the test of time. Honestly, when was the last time you saw a train like that? ;-)

Crazy signs of the times