"We have won the battle against floppy disks!"

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Floppy disks in various sizes have been on the market since the late 60s. Now the Japanese state has finally managed to eliminate all use in the bureaucracy.

Sony stopped producing three and a half inch floppy disks (1.44MB) in 2011, but it took until the summer of 2024 before the country clearly got rid of them all.

But once they were done, it went fast: right up until June, employees used floppy disks to submit documents—more than 1,000 rules and pieces of legislation required the use of the outdated storage format.

Taro Kono is the country's "digital minister" who in 2021 "declared war" on the storage medium. This week he was finally able to declare that "we have found the war against floppy disks!" Unfortunately, they don't seem to have been able to get rid of fax machines: “For example, workplaces have continued to favor fax machines over e-mail – previous plans to remove these machines from public offices were scrapped due to rebuttal,” reports the BBC.

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