Popular perception suggests that Japan is at the cutting-edge of consumer electronics, robotics and aerospace research. It’s also a country where you can whizz around at high speed on a bullet train then sit on a toilet that checks your blood pressure before cleaning the bowl.
In that sense, you’d think it would have no trouble letting go of the past. So when Japan’s government ministers finally called time on floppy disks, the world was surprised. Surely they had disappeared from the land of the rising sun many moons ago?
As it turned out, the country has more than 1,900 regulations determining how data should be shared, and loads of them still require the use of floppy disks. It led a perplexed Taro Kono, Japan’s minister of digital affairs, to enquire: “Where does one even buy a floppy disk these days?” But it would seem that Japan is not alone in having a long-term love of this particular storage medium.
Rewind to the mid-1990s and it’s fair to say that everyone used them. The floppy disk was at its peak, with more than five billion being sold worldwide and barely an office worker or student leaving the house without one in their pocket. But in 1998, Apple announced it was ditching the floppy disk drive when it released the iMac G3. The writing was on the wall from that moment on.
In fact, by March 2011, just 12 million 3.5in floppy disks were being sold each year in
