Compact Disc celebrates 25th anniversary

Associated Press ^ | 08/16/2007 | Toby Sterling

[abt87]

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. ADVERTISEMENT

An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday — and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.

The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.

[dave k]

Vogue was a record label that put out records with photos ‘embedded’ under the vinyl. They were only made for a period of a few years back in the 1940’s...

http://www.voguepicturerecords.org/index.html

[TChris]

I remember listening to my first CD. It was Slade, and I heard it on a player in Radio Shack.

The CD was a total paradigm shift away from the vinyl LP and magnetic cassette tape. Truly a revolutionary technology.

[Species8472]

My teenaged son was helping me clean out the garage a couple of weeks ago when we came across my old IBM selectric typewriter.....

"WOW! what a cool printer dad!"
"It has a keyboard built right into it!"
"Where does the cable plug in?"

LOLOL!

[bmwcyle]

[cynwoody]

If it had been an IBM 2741 in your garage, you'd have had a better answer to your son's question.

The 2741 was a Selectric typewriter set up as a remote terminal. It ran at about 14 characters per second. It printed on fan-folded pin-fed paper — there would have been a box of it behind the terminal in the photo. It was commonly used to access the time sharing systems of the day, such as CP/67, TSS, TSO, or Multics. It was popular with users of the interactive APL programming language. APL used a lot of special characters, which could be supported by simply changing the type ball.