Japan’s Digital Minister, Taro Kono, is celebrating the demise of the floppy disk. "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28," Kono told Reuters earlier today. The milestone, decades after the storage medium’s heyday, was reached as the scrapping of 1,034 official regulations that required the filing of floppy disks was enacted.
Back in January, we reported on the Japanese government's planned abolition of the floppy disk as it sought to modernize. Thus, these last few months have been the final hurrah for the iconic magnetic media format in Japan. As of June 28, only one official regulation requires a floppy to be filed—an environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.
As you can see from his 2.5 million followers on Twitter/X, Kono is something of a character. He seems to relish his role in modernizing Japan’s creaking bureaucracy. He has been vocal about the elimination of long-in-the-tooth formats like floppy and optical disks and has also been dancing on the graves of fax machines and other analog technologies.
Floppy disks were first introduced over 50 years ago, and the largest capacity commonly available disks would hold just 1.44MB of files. This might still be sufficient for simple textual data, but richer content can easily overwhelm it. The hero image in this article was a 3.92MB file before being downsampled and cropped, for example.
The retail availability of floppy disks and a lack of supporting hardware in modern devices will also have encouraged their elimination. Sony, the last floppy media maker, stopped making diskettes over a decade ago. On a personal level - I have access to lots of computers, but none have a floppy disk drive or an optical drive. However, I keep a USB DVD-RW drive for the odd occasion that I need to dig out an old file.
We think eliminating the need for floppy disks and drives from Japanese bureaucracy is a good thing. However, there are still old pieces of equipment ranging from avionics and healthcare to embroidery segments – as well as hobbyists and retro computing folk – that will want to keep their precious floppies. If you own or run a useful and serviceable piece of equipment that uses floppies for data storage or transfer, then why should you abandon it? The same goes for transport systems like the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Caltrain – but there are safety worries concerning the potential failure of their old mission-critical hardware.
