After more than 50 years since the first one was made, Japan has officially killed off the iconic floppy disk.
According to reports, the Japanese government has scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing use of the device, which dates back to the late 1960s.
Amazingly, despite leading the world in groundbreaking hardware, Japan still required its citizens to submit documents stored on floppy disks through the post.
In honour of this beloved relic, reveals the retro tech that older generations still have trouble saying goodbye to – while baffling the kids of today.
From the pager to the fax machine and even the overhead projector – which ones do you remember using?
As Japan kills off the floppy disk, reveals the obsolete technologies that baffle the younger generations
FLOPPY DISK
The floppy disk, invented and made by US tech giant IBM in 1967, was once the preferred format for storing files and transferring them between computers.
A floppy disk is a flexible circle of plastic – the ‘floppy’ part – that’s coated with a magnetic material and enclosed in a hard square plastic case.
Data is arranged on the surface of the magnetic disk in ‘concentric’ tracks, much like the ring-like grooves on a vinyl record.
When inserted into a computer’s floppy disk drive, a metal slide door is opened to expose the inner magnetic circle to read the data.
Floppy disks were eventually made obsolete by compact discs, USBs and flash drives, as a smaller and more portable way to share files from computer to computer, with more storage capacity too.
IBM has said the flopping disk ‘truly revolutionised the way people worked, and quickly became the most widely used storage medium for small systems’.
Amazingly, despite leading the world in groundbreaking technologies, Japan still required its citizens to submit documents stored on floppy disks through the post
The floppy disk, invented and made by IBM in 1967, was once the preferred format for storing files and transferring them between computers
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More than five billion were sold per year worldwide at its peak in the mid-1990s, but now, the little plastic squares are a fast-fading memory for some, and unrecognizable for others.
A memorable comic strip from 2014 showed how far the floppy disk had slipped out of public consciousness. In the comic, a child sees a floppy disk and says: ‘Wow, cool! You made a 3D model of the save icon!’.
According to Reuters, Japan’s Digital Minister Taro Kono has been pushing to eliminate use of the floppy disk – and finally ‘won the war’ against them on June 28, Kono said.
FAX MACHINE
The iconic fax machine – formally known as a facsimile machine – was once a regular feature in offices and even homes, right up to the 2000s.
Fax machines work by allowing users to send an exact copy (a ‘facsimile’) of a page of text or images to the recipient, using a telephone line to do so.
They were popular for big-money transactions with tight deadlines, such as house sales or football transfers, as they enabled contracts to be exchanged quickly.
The technology behind the fax machine was first patented in 1843, more than three decades before Scottish inventor Alexander Bell did so with the telephone.
Even kids of the 1990s and 2000s may remember the fax machine in their home office, somewhere between the phone and the printer
The fax machine – which predates the telephone – was ever-present in the 80s and 90s and allowed businesses to send and receive printed pages or images (file image). Pictured, inventor John Vincent Lawless Hogan (1890 – 1960) watches engineer Richard L. Beam (right) work the controls of his radio facsimile machine, May 1946
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But the rise of digital messaging through phones and laptops made the fax machine less useful to business and individuals, so its impressive run may finally be coming to an end.
After a 2018 survey found 9,000 fax machines were still in use within the NHS, then health secretary Matt Hancock had promised to phase out the ‘archaic machines’.
The UK government plans to abolish traditional landlines as soon as 2025, which means that any remaining fax machines will no longer work.
CASSETTE
Before Spotify on smartphones, iPods and MP3 players, popping a cassette into our Sony Walkman was the dominant method of listening to music on the go.
Much like a floppy disk, a cassette is a rectangular plastic shell that surrounds two rotating spools with tape wrapped around them.
Unlike the floppy disk or the pager, the cassette is having a bit of a comeback – with new music releases available on this old-school physical format
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The tape has a magnetic coating that is used to encode an audio signal.
When slotted into a cassette player, the tape runs past an electromagnetic head on the cassette player for audio playback.
Cassette tapes were initially relatively poor quality and showed low fidelity, and as a result, usage was mainly confined to voice recording and dictation.
But gradual improvements to the tape, materials and hardware led to high fidelity cassettes and players which could be used for music, heralding an era of listening to tunes on the move.
The metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2, the world’s first low-cost personal cassette player, went on sale in Japan in July 1979, and was sold for around ¥33,000 ($150).
After booming in the 1970s and 1980s, the format started to decline in popularity though the 1990s as music buyers opted for CDs instead.
The metal-cased blue-and-silver Walkman TPS-L2, the world’s first low-cost personal cassette player, went on sale in Japan in July 1979, and was sold for around ¥33,000 ($150)
However, the humble cassette does seem to be making something of a comeback for hipster music fans.
To cater for a love of retro, record labels are releasing cassettes as an alternative to vinyl and CDs.
According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), more than 185,000 cassette tapes were sold in the UK in 2021 – up almost 20,000 units from 2020 and the highest recorded sales since 2003.
PORTABLE CD PLAYER
Although it’s not seeing a revival quite like the trendy vinyl, the company disc (CD) is still widely sold and bought.
But yet, the portable CD player seems to have died out, becoming a rare sighting despite being easily able to fit inside a bag or loose pocket.
Did you ever own this model of Sony’s Walkman? Even though CDs are still relatively popular, portable CD players are rarely seen anymore
Again, the proliferation of smartphones and apps that offer an exhaustive library of songs may be to blame for this.
Chris Beer, trends analyst at GWI, told : ‘Consumers want to be in control of their tunes and to have as much choice as possible when they’re on-the-go – more choice than just one disc can provide.
‘Half of Brits preferring to listen to their own playlists and control the music they listen to through making playlists and selecting albums.
‘CD players still have their place among older consumers and nostalgics, but the freedom that digital streaming allows means that people can find a song to match their mood and be listening along in seconds – they have a near limitless record collection on their devices.’
However, you can’t beat listening to an album on the go from start to finish as the artist intended – especially when songs never cut out from a bad Wi-Fi connection.
On apps like Spotify, songs have the tendency to randomly stop playing even if they’ve been downloaded to a device.
VHS
Surely one of the most beloved products of the 1990s was the VHS, the dominant format for watching films and TV shows before the existence of DVDs, Blu-ray and streaming.
VHS, short for video home system, used magnetic tape just like the audio cassette, although the VHS cassette was much bigger and chunkier.
VHS was developed by Japanese company JVC, and after its consumer introduction in September 1976, VHS sparked a home entertainment revolution.
Although its primary rival was Sony’s Betamax, other companies such as Philips, MCA and RCA also produced tape and disc systems that failed to capture the market.
DVDs take you to an interactive menu to start a film or show – but VHS players would always start playing where it left off
Popularity of Betamax tapes (pictured) peaked in 1984 when some 50 million cassettes were shipped, according to Sony
VHS eventually won the format war – although it eventually lost out to digital discs, which has since been largely superseded by video streaming platforms.
Today we have streaming on-demand platforms like BBC iPlayer and All 4 to ensure we can watch programmes even when we missed its live transmission.
But half a century ago, in the absence of this luxury, inserting a blank VHS to a videocassette recorder (VCR) to ‘record off the telly’ really was the only way we could see films and TV later on.
OVERHEAD PROJECTOR
A stalwart of classrooms in the 1990s was the clunky but loveable overhead projector, which uses light to project an enlarged image onto a blank screen.
Light from the base of the device is used to illuminate a clear plastic projector sheet with images or text written on it in pen ink – such as a maths equation or a complicated graph.
Hanging over the base is an adjustable arm containing mirrors, which reflect the light coming through the image and out through a lens.
When the light in the base is turned on, it causes the ink on the projector sheet to be reflected by the mirror so that it can be displayed on the blank surface, usually the teacher’s white board.
A stalwart of classrooms in the 1990s was the clunky but loveable overhead projector, which uses light to project an enlarged image onto a blank screen
Brits of a certain age will remember the tedium of teachers laying sheet after sheet onto the overhead projector during a lesson, alleviated only by knocking the long arm to make the projection move about.
In the 2000s and 2010s, overhead projectors were largely phased out across British classrooms, replaced by power point presentations and massive touchscreen white boards.
PAGER
It’s difficult to imagine an era where WhatsApp wasn’t the go-to for sending and receiving text and voice messages – but the pager was very much a pioneer in this regard.
Also known as a buzzer or beeper, the wireless telecommunications device beeps or vibrates when receiving transmissions from others.
A pager is a small electronic device which you can carry around with you and which gives you a number or a message when someone is trying to contact you
A screen on the pager shows alphanumeric messages, such as a telephone number for the person carrying the device to call.
One-way pagers only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers also acknowledge and reply to messages using an internal transmitter.
Pagers made appearances in classic films of the 1990s and 2000s such as American Beauty, Cast Away and Bruce Almighty.