'We have won the war on floppy disks!' Japan finally declares independence from floppy media
Japan has now officially «won the war on floppy disks», having finally scrapped the many regulations governing their use in and by the government. It might not have been a war you were aware of, but it's been waging for over two years.
Being just shy of 30 years old, for me, floppy disks feature in memories of a bygone era, where disks could be inserted into your machine with a satisfying thunk, perhaps to boot up Doom or another classic DOS game. Those memories are hazy, though, and many of you might have no memory of floppy disks at all.
Unless you're living in Japan, that is, because until a few days ago, the Japanese government was still using them for all its systems. Now, according to Reuters (via Sweclockers), thanks to the efforts of Japan's Digital Minister Taro Kono, Japan has declared victory against the aged storage device.
Floppy disks—those beautifully square, pleasurably solid, plastic-and-metal disks that I wouldn't entirely resent the return of—were popular in the 80s and 90s for creating and distributing software. (For our younger readers, there's a graphic of one above. Doesn't it look lovely?)
Floppy disks were (nay, are) kinda cool. They work a little like cassette tapes, but with the magnetisable material that stores data on it running in concentric circles atop a spinning disk housed inside plastic casing. However, floppy disks have incredibly limited storage capacity. So, as software got more complex and capacious in the 90s, companies had to start spreading their software across multiple disks, which became increasingly inconvenient for both manufacturers and consumers.
Long story short, although floppy disks stuck around for a while for firmware updates and the likes, people moved on and started to use newer and more capacious storage devices such as CDs. By the mid- to late-noughties, they were nigh-on obsolete for serious storage in the West.
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