Japan finally gives up on 1.44MB floppy disk drives, 50 years after they went on sale — but there’s no sign of Microsoft removing the iconic ‘Save’ floppy icon from Office just yet
Japanese government will no longer insist on its data being stored on floppy disks
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Even thoughfloppy disks have long since gone the way of the dodo, the ghost of the ancient recording media still haunts the digital world. As a great example, when you go to save a file inMicrosoftOffice, you’ll see the save icon still appears as a floppy disk, even though there’s a good chance you’ll be saving your content incloud storage, rather than to a slow, clunky plastic square with extremely limited storage capacity.
Japan is known for being at the forefront of technology, but the country’s government is stillsomewhat reliant on floppy disks.
As reported byTom’s Hardware, there were about 1,900 official governmental application procedures that stipulated businesses must submit floppies or CD-Roms (specifically) containing supplementary data until last week. Finally, however, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is looking to abandon this outdated practice.
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Updating the rules
METI has issued a “Ministerial Ordinance to Amend Some of the METI Ordinances for Promoting Regulatory Reforms to Foster a Digital Society”, which aims to review and update rules that dictate the use of obsolete media like floppy disks. According toPC Watch, this initiative is part of a broader review of analog regulations (digital principles) across various ministries, spearheaded by the Digital Agency.
The current law not only mandates the use of outdated recording media, but it also leaves ambiguity about whether cloud-based actions – such as creating and saving documents online – are even permitted.
It’s astonishing that it has taken this long for the Japanese government to take action, but METI is finally on the case. In an effort to modernize the regulations, it will eliminate any references to specific media types like “floppy disk” or “CD-Rom” and replace them with more contemporary terms, such as “electromagnetic recording media.”
This move follows a series of initiatives in Japan aimed at reducing dependence on outdated technology, but it is proving to be somewhat challenging. For instance, the fax machinecontinues to be widely used in the land of the rising sun. A survey conducted in May 2022 revealed that 54% of companies were still utilizing this antiquated mode of communication.
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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.
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