Young people nowadays probably don’t know what a floppy disk (floppy drive) is. The save button in Word actually comes from a floppy disk. However, for the Bank of Japan and government departments, floppy disks are not eliminated. Even if banks charge US$500 a month, the staff of Japanese government departments must use floppy disks to store key information for reliability and safety.
Japan’s IT technology is very developed, and electronic technology has been popularized many years ago.However, many banks are still using 3.5-inch floppy disks today, more than 30 years later. This is not all because banks are unwilling to upgrade new technologies. It is because many bank customers are still using floppy disks, and banks have to keep the corresponding system.
According to the previous plan, many Japanese banks will phase out 3.5-inch floppy disks by the end of this year, but Japanese local government departments are not satisfied. With their efforts, Japanese banks postpone the delay for 5 years, and they can continue until 2026. Serve customers with floppy disks.
But the bank also had to increase the fee for this service, with a monthly charge of US$500, which is about 3,200 yuan. Even so, officials of these government departments are still very happy to continue using floppy disks.
Why are Japanese government departments so conservative?An official in charge of public funds in Meguro-ku, Tokyo gave reasons. The experience of the past years has shown that floppy disks and drives have almost never been damaged or lost data.This area has long been using floppy disks to store employee benefits information, and these floppy disks will be sent to the bank for processing.
In addition, the representative also said that government departments have sufficient floppy disk inventory that can be used for many years-considering that companies such as Sony discontinued floppy disk production almost ten years ago, it really does not clear how many floppy disks these departments actually purchased that year.
