Two years after the Japanese government declared “a war on floppy disks”, their use has finally been eliminated.

In 2011, Sony ceased production of the floppy disk. As a form of media on which to save documents, the 3.5-inch floppy disk was a mainstay of PC software almost three decades ago. According to PCMag, by 1996 five billion ‘floppies’ were in use, with each one accommodating up to 1.44MB of data.

While the floppy disk has since been overtaken by advancements in other forms of storage media including CDs, DVDs, USBs and the cloud, floppy disks continue to be used in Japan.

The Japanese government has for many years required residents to use floppy disks or CD-ROMs to submit more than 1,900 official documents to the government.

However, while Japan had for a number of years said it would implement a plan to switch to internet-based submissions, it was only in 2022 that Taro Kono, Japan’s new minister for digital transformation and head of the Digital Agency, put a plan to eradicate...