The outdated technology had remained widespread and firmly ingrained in a country reluctant to give up familiar, older technology. Japan's govern

Japanese government erases floppy disks from systems as part of tech modernisation campaign

submited by

Style Pass

2024-07-10 12:30:04

The outdated technology had remained widespread and firmly ingrained in a country reluctant to give up familiar, older technology.

Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades after the technology's heyday.

Japan's Digital Agency spent several years scrapping more than 1,000 regulations and procedures requiring the use of floppy disks, which had remained widespread and firmly ingrained in a country reluctant to give up familiar, older technology.

Created in the 1960s, the floppy disk emerged as a solution for information sharing in a pre-internet era, when computers utilised significantly smaller file sizes.

Sony introduced the ubiquitous 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981 and was their last manufacturer until they ended sales in 2011, as floppy disks were replaced by more efficient storage technology.

By comparison, it would take more than 22,000 standard floppy disks containing 1.44 MB of data to match the storage of a single 32 GB thumb drive.