Japan’s Digital Minister Strikes Homeland: ‘We’ve Won the War on Floppy Disks!’

Floppy disks, or floppy disks, are thin, flexible plastic disks with a magnetic disc on which you can store digital data. They were developed in the late 1960s by the American technology company IBM. Originally they were 8 inches (about 20 x 20 cm, red). It was the 3.5 inch version that made a big splash in the 1980s and 1990s.

For decades, floppy disks have been the go-to tool for transferring data from your computer. personal computer (Read: desktop) to store and take with you. You inserted it into a slot in your computer case, so you could start up anywhere easily and cheaply. A floppy disk of that era had a capacity of 1.4 megabytes, limited by today’s standards. A 32GB memory stick would fit 22,000 of those disks.

In 1998, the floppy disk suffered its first blow when computer manufacturer Apple launched the new iMac model without a slot in the computer case. Other manufacturers also made the switch. Since then, the floppy disk has been overtaken by rewritable CDs, USB memory sticks, external hard drives, and now especially online storage in cloudsIn 2011, Sony, the largest manufacturer of floppy disks, stopped producing them.

CDs haven’t completely disappeared from our computer’s image. Just look at the “Save” icon on your screen.