Happy 25th birthday - Compact Disk
On August 17th, 1982, the first mass-produced compact disk was pressed.
From
The Register:
Compact Disc: 25 years old today
The Compact Disc is 25 years old. Though the digital audio format's development stretches back many years before 17 August 1982, that was the date on which the world's first CD pressing plant punched out its very first disc.
According to Philips - with Sony, the format's co-developer - the first disc off the Hanover, Germany production line was Abba's The Visitors.
While CD production commenced in August 1982, the format wasn't formally brought to market until November, and then only in Japan. US and European music lovers had to wait until March 1983 for the first discs specifically tailored for them.
According to the article:
The development of the CD stretches back to 1979 when Sony and Philips established an engineering team to create a disc capable of storing music in digital form. According to Philips, the original design spec called for a 11.5cm-diameter disc capable of holding an hour's music, but this was later extended to 12cm and 74m minutes - sufficient to accomodate the whole of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Some writers claim this was driven by Sony co-founder Akio Morita, in order to ensure his favourite symphony could be stored on a single disc.
The first players were in the $500 range (and we are talking 1982 dollars here!) so I waited until the players dropped to under $100. Still kept the vinyl for a while but gradually sold that off as my collection grew. last year, I spent several weeks transferring all of the CDs to MP3 and iTunes and have a living room media machine -with about 30 days of non-stop music...
One of these technologies that breaks the mold.
Posted by DaveH at August 17, 2007 7:51 PM