Japan might be one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, but people there have long been required to use 3.5-inch floppy disks or CD-ROMs to submit official documents to the government. Until now.
As The Register reports, the country has now implemented a plan that will open the door for internet-based submissions to the government.
The move affects more than 1,900 documents; a list on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) website mentions mining, weapons manufacturing, small business development, and industrial water supply, among other things.
The plan has been in the works for several years, and got moving under Taro Kono, Japan's minister for digital transformation, in 2022, when he declared "a war on floppy discs."
As we noted in our 2022 look back at the evolution of PC storage media, 3.5-inch floppies were a mainstay of PC software well into the 90s; 5 billion 3.5-inch floppies were in use by 1996. But the small diskettes couldn’t keep up with the demands of bloated software. Sony, one of the biggest manufacturers, stopped making 3.5-inch floppies in 2011.