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 CD man. Not just an anniversary, but a whole anniversary - 30 years from the moment of the first presentation to the public.

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

The credit for spreading the CD format belongs, however, not only to Philips, but also to Sony, which helped in its standardization - some time later it was called the “Red Book” and included everything from the playing time (74 minutes), the disc diameter and before sampling 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 on this has not even begun - only a preface was written. The first chapter of popularity was completed on October 1, 1982, when Billy Joel's album "52nd Street" became the first truly musical compact disc - it was quietly released in Japan along with the first CD player: Sony CDP-101. This day was a small revolution in the media environment.
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The music CD industry peaked at the same time as the release of The Beatles album “1”, which sold 30 million copies. After that, approaching the second millennium, sales fell permanently against the background of the growing popularity of mp3 - in 2008, for example, sales of compact discs fell by 20%

On this, apparently, the history of “compact disc” is coming to an end - the volumes of information are growing, and ordinary CDs are no longer able to cope with the demands of users. Nevertheless - during these 30 years the CD has noticeably changed the gadgets, the IT industry and the world around - just look at the hot drink stands in your house :)

Gizmodo via engadget