Technology

59577 readers

3157 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

576

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

100 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 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.