Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks

They only stopped using floppies because it was getting (napkin math) 20 million times more expensive per data volume than modern data storage.

(this comment isn't satire, i do occasionally use ti silent 703 connected to my computer)

As humans, we have a few forms of I/O: reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing, singing, doing, going.

Phone calls use listening and speaking. Emails are reading and typing.

It is possible to do some of these in parallel - I can listen to music and sing along while coding or walking.

Writing (with a pen or pencil) is not common on a computer. There are graphics tablets, but they are made for art, not legal signatures, and they don't include a paper copy.

Replacing the fax machine would involve Wacom (pen digitiser), Adobe (PDF certificate chain of trust), Mitsubishi (pens to make a hard copy while writing the tele-letter), and then 50 years of risk assessment throughout the organisation, slowly filtering through the Process changes needed to replace fax.

Should fax be replaced? Yes! Definitely! But there's reasons why the culture in Japan still uses fax, and changing the root cause is much more work than just suggesting another communication preference. If someone told me to leave a voicemail to Hacker News instead of a typed comment, I probably wouldn't have sent this reply. People are not wrong to prefer writing, and fax technology still serves their needs better than email.