30th anniversary of the cd

It turns out that March 8th was not only International Women's Day, but also the birthday of the old man on the CD. Not just an anniversary, but a whole anniversary - 30 years from the moment of its first presentation to the public.

A bit of history: on March 8, 1979, the first CD prototype, code-named “Pinkeltje”, was announced as a replacement for then popular music records. It took place at an event called “Optical digital audio disc demo” in Eindhoven, Holland. From that moment, according to rough estimates, about 3.5 billion CD of audio players and about 240 billion of the discs themselves were sold.

The merit of distribution of the CD format belongs, however, not only to Philips, but also to Sony, which helped in its standardization - after a while it was called the “Red Book” and included everything: from the time of playback (74 minutes), the diameter of the disc and up to sample rate. The book The Compact Disc Story, written by employees of both companies, states: "The CD was invented collectively by a large group of people from both companies working as a team."

But the history of the CD has not even begun on this - only the preface was written. The first chapter of popularity was completed on October 1, 1982, when musician Billy Joel's 52nd Street album became the first truly music CD - it was quietly released in Japan along with the first CD player: Sony CDP-101. This day was a small revolution in the medium of information media.

The music CD industry peaked at the same time as The Beatles' 1, which sold 30 million copies, was released. After that, approaching the second millennium, sales permanently fell against the backdrop of the growing popularity of mp3s - in 2008, for example, sales of CDs fell by 20%

On this, apparently, the history of “compact disc” comes to an end - the volumes of information are growing, and ordinary CDs are no longer able to cope with the requirements of users. Nevertheless - over the 30 years the CD has noticeably changed gadgets, the IT industry and the world around it - just look at least at the hot drink coasters in your home :)

Gizmodo via Engadget