30 years old cd

Thirty years ago, on October 1, 1982, for the first time, a completely new information carrier hit the store shelves - Billy Joel’s sixth studio album “52nd Street”, which was recorded on a compact disc (CD), was offered to customers in record stores. The choice of artist and album for the novelty was not chosen by chance - in 1979 the album received a Grammy, and the title song became the best in the nomination “The Best Male Performance of Pop Composition”.

The history of the invention of the CD is far from unambiguous. Its development was started in the depths of the Philips company in 1974 with the aim of creating an optical carrier of audio information with sound quality exceeding the quality of vinyl records and a diameter of 20 cm, and the new development was invested an astronomical sum of $ 60 million for those times. in 1979, Philips managed to release the first CD player, but soon after its release, the company began to look for contacts with another electronics manufacturer, Japanese company Sony, in order to unite efforts to develop a new audio recording technology.

The then director of Philips Lou Ottens believed that one hour of music on the disc would be more than enough. However, Sony Vice President Norio Og, who studied music at the Berlin Conservatoire, insisted that the total time for playing a CD should be such that not only contemporary (1979) artists' albums could be placed on the disc, but also classical works. As a result, it was agreed that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 74 minutes long, should become just the standard for the duration of the CD's audio recording, which became known as CD-DA (Compact Disk Digital Audio).

As a result, three years later, on August 17, 1982, the first industrial design of the CD was released at the production facilities of Philips, which recorded the album of the super-popular then ABBA "The Visitors". Thus, the final disc size was set at 120 mm with a capacity of 74 minutes of audio recording and a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz.
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In 1992, sales of various-purpose CDs (audio and video) reached 200,000. And in 1996, the same alliance - Philips and Sony - introduced the technology of recording high-density optical discs, which was called DVD (Digital Video Disk).

UPD: Zhores Alferov, a graduate of the Faculty of Electronic Engineering at the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000, "For the development of semiconductor elements used in ultrafast computers and fiber-optic communications" also made a significant contribution to the development of the "cold laser" which are actively used in reading and writing CDs.