'We won the war on floppy disks': Japan repeals 1034 rules mandating floppy disks

Japan is not only about ultra-modern 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 seems that the Japanese Digital Agency has finally put an end to this anachronism.

In Japan, 1034 rules imposing the use of floppy disks have been canceled, including one environmental restriction related to recycling, including one environmental limitation on vehicles. The Digital Agency was established during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, attempts to deploy nationwide testing and vaccination showed that the Japanese government still used outdated technology and paper documentation.

"We won the war with floppy disks on June 28!" said Minister of Digital Technology Taro Kono, who intensified the war against outdated storage devices and devices such as fax machines after taking office in 2022.

There are probably many people in the world today who have never used floppy disks and have never even seen them in person. Magnetic disks were quite popular in the 1970s and 1990s - they were used to transfer data between computers not connected to a network. Obsolete 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 towards a future without floppy disks with the release of the iMac G3 without a floppy drive. Internal documents indicate 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 the cessation of their sales in 2010.

Source: Reuters