Key Takeaways
- The Japanese government has finally phased out the use of floppy disks, decades after the technology’s heyday.
- To adapt, over 1,000 laws and regulations had to be rewritten.
- Digital Minister Taro Kono announced that after three years of effort, the battle against floppy disks has been won.
Do you remember when Apple, Microsoft, and all the other big computer companies used floppy disks? If you were born in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you might not remember them. In fact, you might not even know what a floppy disk is.
These days, such outdated technology has been almost completely removed from everyday life, relegated to museum exhibits and things people bid on at auctions (unless, of course, you work for the Japanese government). But that’s finally about to change.
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Japanese government finally begins phasing out floppy disks
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One of the greatest truisms in bureaucracy is that no organization is slower to adapt and change than its government, and Japan has proven it again, to cheers from the “better late than never” crowd on the Internet.
According to Reuters, the Japanese government recently announced that it would finally stop using floppy disks, about 20 years later than most other governments in the civilized world.
Part of the problem is that it wasn’t a simple, era-signaling task of administrative assistants hauling boxes of floppy disks to the trash. Rather, taking this step into the 21st century required over 1,000 different government regulations and laws to be rewritten or removed from the record entirely. Thankfully, one regulation remains in place: Japan has still established rules for recycling floppy disks to avoid a repeat of the ET game cartridge fiasco.
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Japan completed its phase-out of floppy disks in mid-June, with Digital Minister Taro Kono announcing the completion of a process that began in 2021 and celebrating the achievement three years in the making.
“June 28th, the floppy disk war was won!”
Kono’s agency was established three years ago after the Japanese government realized how reliant it was on paper, fax machines and other outdated technology as it continued to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
It remains unclear what the intelligence community will declare war on next. Apparently, Japan is a haven for machines and technology that should have been wiped off the face of the earth years ago.
The Digital Agency also says it wants the government to become less reliant on devices like fax machines, but since it took three full years to phase out floppy disks, one might wonder whether a similar announcement about fax machines will come in the 2030s.
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