It seems incredible, but in countries as advanced as Japan The floppy disk remains a medium used by public administrations.. Depending on your age, you may not even know what a floppy disk is and long story short, I can tell you that it is a storage format that was born in 1971 and that, although it has not completely disappeared, has been considered obsolete for years. now.
First came CD-ROMs, then came USB sticks, and finally came the cloud with options like iCloud. However, long before Japan decided to completely phase out the format, Steve Jobs’ Apple has already shown that this is a thing of the past. We haven’t seen a Mac with a floppy drive in 27 years.
Japan didn’t live in the future. Apple did.
You have probably come across a video, image or document with the text “Japan lives 2050” or any other reference to the Japanese living far ahead of others. In a way, it is right to acknowledge their great technological advances, even if it is equally reprehensible that by the middle of 2024, their technology will have disappeared.
Because yes, floppy disks are still being sold and are a good collector’s item, but their practical utility in real life has clearly been displaced in favor of more modern items. So, as Reuters reports, it’s a good thing that Japanese government departments no longer need these accessories. Especially since we haven’t seen computers with these capabilities in years (although they are sold separately).
The first iMac in history was also the first to not have a hard drive.
The fact is that Apple got rid of floppy drives almost 30 years ago. It was in 1998 that they launched their brand new iMac G3. It was a very advanced computer for its time and there are still second-hand stocks of it for collectors.
A controversial absence that ended up working out well for Apple
iMac G3, probably the most pioneering computer in Apple’s history (courtesy of Apple I)
This iMac brought a great novelty and a great absence. For the first time, it introduced a CD-ROM drive and, at the same time, it removed the floppy disk drive that, for Steve Jobs, had become obsolete. The CEO at the time had just returned to Apple a year earlier and the iMac G3 was one of the key products in the resurgence of a company on the verge of bankruptcy.
It was a risky bet, but ultimately successful.. At that time, it was still a widely used format and there were surely those who missed its presence in the iMac G3. However, driven not only by Apple, but also by other manufacturers, it would not take long for formats such as CD-ROM to become established.
Of course, you shouldn’t think that the successor to the floppy disk was any luckier. At Apple, we’ve also been missing CD and DVD drives for 12 years, and more precisely since the 13-inch MacBook Pro in mid-2012. However, it was only this year that Apple declared the official death of this computer and, consequently, of the CD drive.
There slow death of the floppy disk is once again corroborated by what has been announced by the Japanese government. Of course, do not think that it is completely dead, since the Japanese are not the only ones who have had this format so far. The best example is the train of San Francisco, a city close to Silicon Valley and not particularly proud of having companies like Apple so close.
By | Xataka
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