Japan — is not only about state-of-the-art high-speed trains and self-cleaning toilets. The flip side of progress was that the country’s regulations required government agencies to use flexible magnetic disks known as floppy disks. It looks like Japan’s Digital Agency has finally put an end to this anachronism.
Japan has canceled 1034 rules that impose the use of floppy disksincluding one environmental constraint related to recycling vehicles. The digital agency was created during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, attempts to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination showed that the Japanese government was still using outdated technology and paperwork.
«We won the war against floppy disks on June 28!», — said Digital Minister Taro Kono, who, after taking office in 2022 has intensified the war against outdated drives and devices such as fax machines.
There are probably many people in the world today who have never used a floppy disk or even seen one in person. Magnetic disks were quite popular in the 1970s and 1990s — they were used to transfer data between computers that were not connected to a network. The outdated technology began to decline about two and a half decades ago when networks, the Internet, and flash drives became more popular.
In 1998, Apple became one of the first companies to move toward a floppy diskless future with the release of the iMac G3 without a floppy drive. Internal documents say that Intel intended to get rid of floppy disks as early as 2001. Sony, which held about 70% of the 3.5″ floppy disk market, announced in 2010 that it would stop selling them.
Source: Reuters
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