The compact disk celebrates its 25th anniversary today.

 

August 17, 2007: The compact disk celebrates its 25th anniversary today.
Jointly developed by Royal Philips Electronics in Holland and the Sony Corporation of Japan, the optical disks revolutionised the recording industry in the 1990s, replacing cassette tapes and vinyl LPs. Since then, they have dominated data storage and transmission and been a key factor in the proliferation of video games.
Philips is credited with developing most of the disk and laser technology used for recording and playing back CDs, while Sony contributed the encoding that ensures smooth, error-free playback. In 1980, researchers from both companies published the “Red Book” containing the original CD standards and specifying which patents were held by each company.
The first CDs to roll off the production line in Hanover, Germany, on 17 August, 1982, carried recordings of Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony. According to the manufacturers, those disks would sound just as good if played today as they did when they were first pressed. By October of the same year, Sony has its first CD players on sale in Japan. Within four years, CD players were outselling record players and by two years later, sales of CDs overtook record sales. According to Associated Press, pre-recorded CD sales peaked in 2001 at 712 million.
But the technology is now seen as in decline, partly due to the arrival of higher-capacity DVD disks and the shift by consumers to music downloads, although CD sales still account for most of the recording industry’s revenues. Recording companies seeking to maintain the CD format have experimented with hybrid CD/DVD combinations and packages that carry traditional music CDs plus DVDs with video and multimedia content. But they have not met with marketplace success.