The Japanese government has just achieved a rare victory in 2024: getting rid of the use of floppy disks

Some aspects of Japan such as advances in the field of robotics, high-speed trains and ultra-fast Internet connections can make us think that this Asian country “live in the futureHowever, a part of their society has maintained a strong connection with technologies of the past for a long time.

In an increasingly interconnected world where cloud services are becoming more comprehensive and robust, cash payments, faxing documents and filing forms on diskette are still a reality in Japan. But it seems that this nation is finally leaving certain practices behind.

Japan says goodbye to the floppy disk

Reuters points out that Taro Kono has announced that the Government has finally “won the floppy disk war”. Japan’s Minister of Digital Affairs celebrated This is the culmination of a long struggle to almost completely eliminate the use of this obsolete storage medium from national administrative procedures.

The use of diskettes was so ingrained in the government that eradicating them overnight was an impossible mission. As a frame of reference, two years ago, some 1,900 procedures mentioned the handling of physical media such as floppy disks either CDs. And this was a problem for promoting modern alternatives.

As I recognized the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan some provisions were ambiguousFor example, many documents could be sent via cloud platforms, but the people or officials involved often chose the safe option to avoid inconvenience: using a diskette.

The country’s Digital Agency, for its part, led an arduous task of updating the regulations with the aim of modernising all the provisions affected. Finally, at the end of June, only one regulation required the presentation of documentation on media such as diskettes: one related to vehicle recycling.

Japan has taken the final step to get rid of floppy disks, but this magnetic storage medium initially introduced in the early 1970s (in its original 8-inch version), will live on in some important systems such as some San Francisco trains or certain Boeing 747s.

Images | Behnam Norouzi | sj

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