IBM started to ship diskettes in 1973 and this type of removable storage media eventually become so popular that Japanese government agencies imposed a rule to submit data on diskettes and over time on CD-ROMs. Apparently, this rule is still valid, so officials have been using diskettes and CD-ROMs — instead of emails or cloud storage services — to submit data to this day.
Some of Japan's Ministers of State think that it's time to move forward.
"Where can you buy floppy disks these days?" Taro Kono, Japan's Minister of Digital Affairs, asked reporters rhetorically on Tuesday, reports Nikkei. "We will change [these rules] promptly."
At present, Japanese laws contain 1,900 provisions requiring the use of obsolete storage media, such as 3.5-inch diskettes or CD-ROMs. Going digital will make Japanese government agencies more efficient overall as file transfers via the Internet are quicker. But, like other authorities, Japanese government agencies must follow rules meticulously — and so the Japanese government has created a task force to revise the rules set decades ago.
Nowadays it is not only hard to obtain diskettes (as they are barely manufactured by anyone), it's also difficult to use them to store anything, because modern text and spreadsheet files require much more space than their predecessors from the 1980s and 1990s. There are still applications that rely on file formats (and even software) released 30 or 40 years ago — and can therefore be stored on diskettes and/or CD-ROMs — the world has mostly moved on to USB flash drives, Blu-ray discs, and cloud storage services, all of which have larger capacities and are more efficient and reliable.
That said, there are some industries that use diskettes and will continue to use them for a while. For example, some Boeing 747-400 planes use 3.5-inch diskettes for avionics software. Also, some of military equipment and sections (such as nuclear forces) continue to use not only 8-inch diskettes, but even punched cards.
With thousands of laws requiring usage of diskettes or CD-ROMs, we assume it will take quite some time before the obsolete storage media goes extinct. Until then, one can still enjoy an external 3.5-inch diskette reader even on Windows 11 machines for as little as $20 — though it does require a special driver from Microsoft.
