25 year anniversary
The Compact Disc has crossed 25 years in its illustrious life. The format that revolutionized how we listen to music, watch movies and save data has come a long long way since it was born. It was August 17, 1982 and an assembly line in a suburb of Hanover, Germany began pumping out a modest collection of laser-encoded palm-sized discs, officially paving the path for what would later become the most popular album format.
According to Philips, the first CD was ABBA’s The Visitors, an album that is now available on iTunes. CD players were brought to the market in Germany for the 1982 holiday season, by which time nearly 150 albums were already available. The format made its way to the US the following spring.
And these days when we talk of next-gen tech that includes HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the underlying technology is still based on what was created 25 years ago by Sony and Philips.