Ahh, floppy disks. Few things carry nostalgia quite like a floppy — either 3 1⁄2 or 5 1⁄4, depending on which generation of hacker you happen to be. (And yes, we hear you grey-beards, 8-inch … ...

Japan began moving away from the 20th-century storage devices, magnetic disks encased in plastic, just two years ago, when Taro Kono, the country’s digital minister, declared a “war on floppy ...