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.
