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The floppy disk refused to die in Japan - laws that forced the continued use of floppies have finally hit the chopping block (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 9 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] Maven@lemmy.sdf.org 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Like, the first paragraph explains.

Until last week there were about 1,900 official governmental application procedures that stipulated businesses must submit floppies or CD-ROMs (specifically) containing supplementary data.

Not "the government had to accept them", but "businesses were required to submit them".

It's not a hypothetical problem, there was even news a few years ago about how businesses were complaining they had to send in a dozen+ disks at a time because of file formats.

The laws were written at the dawn of the digital age, in the 70s and 80s, stipulating specific storage media, and just never got updated because the government didn't view it as a problem.