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Bug of the moment 2006-08-19


While working on a mock-up shot for Cy/VOS showing a paned container window, I made a curious discovery: the Save icon in WordPad shows most of the disc back to front:

Since most of you will have forgotten what a floppy disc is, here is a reminder of life in the dark ages:

As you can now see, in the icon, the high density hole is on the wrong side, the write permit hole is absent and the shutter is on backwards. (The icon is not mirrored as the corner notch is correct.)

It turns out that this is a very old mistake that goes back to the likes of Paint Shop Pro 3.11:

CorelDRAW! 5:

And even persisted in Word 98 for Macintosh (which curiously has no idea what proportional scroll bars are either):

Delphi 1 got it right:

As did Wayfarer’s disc icon:

Wayfarer has two disc gadgets, side by side, and only one is correct:

Clearly Iain Clifford Heath didn’t notice even when drawing two icons side by side in an the gadgets bitmap.

Incidentally, lili wondered if that icon would get replaced soon, since discs are nearly obsolete. But what symbol could we use to represent save, that is independent of media? I think Superman, saving your work:

If you log into Windows with a user account with a woman’s name, you’d get Supergirl or some such. Have to make your PC PC after all.


The stories behind two of the other oddities. My 486 PC needed special software to trick the BIOS into reading hard drives over 512 megabytes. Seagate supplied a program for this on my Medalist 1.2 GB drive … on the hard drive itself. Hence the need for a more accessible copy.

As for WordPad, someone sent me an e-mail proclaiming he had “broken [his] Web server” and proceeded to send his entire Apache config as RTF files. In a font I don’t have. So that I could guess what might be broken and why it might be broken. In 12 point Impact.


Posted 19th August 2006 – Comments and questions?