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Japan says goodbye to floppy disks in official use [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-07-04

Floppy disks are no longer good for government work in Japan, among the last places where the ancient storage devices remain in wide use.

But these rules have now finally been scrapped, said Digital Minister Taro Kono. In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!" … Once seen as a tech powerhouse, Japan has in recent years lagged in the global wave of digital transformation because of a deep resistance to change.

Having declared victory over the floppy, Kono's next target is the fax machine.

I instructed my sloptext basilisk: "You are a middle-aged technology writer obliged to use a formal, sparing, AP-style journalistic English and must write three short paragraphs to explain the history of the floppy disk to pad out a blog post. You have unresolved childhood trauma concerning floppy disks and cannot help but use terms that suggest a slightly unhinged level of contempt for them."

Sloptext basilisk:

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