The icons whose objects died.
Some pictures outlived the things they draw. The disk stopped shipping, the desk phone went flat, the moth was real — and the icons kept working anyway. A short, honest exhibit for each.
The floppy disk
The 3.5-inch diskette stopped shipping in computers two decades ago, but its picture still means save everywhere — the skeuomorph outlived the object. A generation now presses a picture of something they have never held, and reads it without a moment's hesitation. The image no longer points at a thing in the world; it points only at an action.
The hamburger
Three stacked lines, drawn by designer Norm Cox for the Xerox Star in 1981 to signal a hidden list in a screen too small to show it. It vanished with the Star, then came back forty years on when phone screens recreated the exact problem it was made to solve: not enough room to lay the options out.
The power symbol
The line and the circle are binary: 1 for on, 0 for off, from mid-century switch labeling standardized by the IEC. The familiar mark — a line breaking the circle — is the standby symbol: power that is neither fully on nor off, which is fitting for how most devices now live.
The handset
The curved earpiece-to-mouthpiece silhouette belongs to desk telephones that peaked half a century ago. Phones became flat glass, and the icon kept the old shape — because the new one has no shape at all. You cannot draw a call from a featureless rectangle, so the drawing stayed with the handset.
The bug
In 1947, Grace Hopper's team at Harvard found a moth jammed in a relay of the Mark II and taped it into the logbook: “First actual case of bug being found.” The word was older — engineers, Edison among them, had used bug for defects since the 1800s — but computing's most famous specimen is real, and the page survives.