Japan Finally Sends Floppy Disks to Recycle Bin
"We have won the war on floppy disks!" said Japan's digital minister, Taro Kono, at the beginning of July.
Kono said Japan no longer needs people to use the old disks for any government business.
Before that, there were still more than 1,000 government regulations that asked people to submit data using floppy disks.
But not anymore.
It's a war Kono has been hoping to win since 2021, when he first announced plans to send floppy disks to the scrapheap.
Many felt the country had been slow to move on from old technology. Kono has also said he'd like to see the end of the fax machine, which some Japanese companies — and government offices — still prefer to email.
Floppy disks began to go out of fashion in the 1990s, and it's easy to see why: 9-centimeter floppy disks can hold just 1.44 megabytes of data.
That's enough space for about half of a pop song!
But although big technology companies stopped making floppy disks a number of years ago, they're still used in some places.
This was something Kono himself posted about on X earlier this month.
"Suddenly everyone loves floppy disks," he joked when he posted a link to a story about the disks still being used to run trains in San Francisco.
According to Wired, these US trains could still need floppy disks until 2030.
And some people still love the floppy disk. As Tom Persky, who runs a floppy disk business in the US, told Computerworld: "For my customers it works better and cheaper than anything else."
