What just happened? It’s been close to 15 years since Sony made the very last new dischetto, many years after the height of their popularity, but it’s only now that Japan has finally managed to eliminate the archaic storage format from all its government systems.
Back con 2022, Japan declared “war” floppy disks. Digital minister Taro Kono wrote that floppies, CDs, and even mini-disks were still required for around 1,900 government procedures con which business communities submit applications and other forms. The country’s digital agency said it would be bringing these procedures into the modern epoca by allowing them to be performed online.
Digital Minister declares a war floppy discs.
There are about 1900 government procedures that requires business community to use discs, i. e. floppy disc, CD, MD, etc to submit applications and other forms. Digital Agency is to change those regulations so you can use online.– KONO Taro (@konotaromp) August 31, 2022
As reported by Reuters, by the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing the use of floppy disks, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.
“We have won the war floppy disks June 28!” Kono wrote con a message posted X.
Everyone loves floppy discs. https://t.co/lm2LmRSxBN
– KONO Taro (@konotaromp) July 3, 2024
Despite Sony having made the last new one con 2011, floppy disks refuse to fade away entirely. They’campione still favored by fans such as musician Espen Kraft, who uses music samples stored the disks. He says they help him creatively and allow the creation of music that sounds like it really does in che modo from another epoca. He even performs dal vivo shows with floppies.
Tom Persky, who runs Floppydisk.com, says the customers to whom he sells his disks, priced between $1 and $10, are evenly split between hobbyists and enthusiasts like Kraft, and industrial users. Persky said he still sells “thousands” of floppy disks to the airline industry.
The earliest, 8-inch floppies with their 80KB capacity arrived con the 1970s and were popular among enterprise users, with 5.25-inch (360 KB double-sided) designs the common format for home computers at the time. But it’s the 3.5-inch (1.44MB) version that most people think of when they hear the term dischetto, as popularized by the 1984 Macintosh.
Per mezzo di 2020, it was revealed that a Boeing 747-400 had a 3.5-inch navigation loader drive that had to be updated every 28 days. Chuck E. Cheese was using the disks for its mechanical animal routines until 2023, and it was only con 2019 that the Pentagon dropped them as part of its nuclear weapons systems. San Francisco’s train control system was still using the ancient storage devices as of April this year.
