Japan has completely abandoned floppy disks only now. They were used until 2024 according to 1034 rules

In Japan, in addition to state-of-the-art high-speed trains and self-cleaning toilets, there has long been a mandatory practice of using flexible magnetic disks, known as floppy disks, in government institutions. However, Japan’s Digital Agency, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, finally decided to eliminate this anachronism by canceling 1,034 regulations that required the use of floppy disks. Among the repealed rules was an environmental restriction on recycling, as well as a restriction on the use of diskettes in vehicles.

The initiative became necessary after efforts to conduct mass testing and vaccination showed that the Japanese government continued to operate with outdated equipment and paper documentation. In today’s world, many people may never have encountered floppy disks and never seen them live. These magnetic disks were especially popular in the 1970s and 1990s for transferring data between computers not connected to a network.

However, with the development of the Internet and flash drives, this format gradually lost its position. In 1998, Apple released the iMac G3 without a floppy drive, marking the first step toward a floppy-free future. In 2001, Intel also planned to get rid of floppy disks. In 2010, Sony, which controlled approximately 70% of the market for 3.5-inch floppy disks, announced the end of their production.