The compact disc was an amazing piece of technology and was co-developed by Phillips and Sony in 1982. It was originally created to store and play sound recordings and later migrated to data storage, rewritable media, video, etc.
One of the challenges they had was that their invention was well ahead of its time. The storage capacity of each disc was actually more than personal computers had at the time. With this in mind, it wasn’t too far off from the storage capacity of some of the original IPods so when they burned songs on the disc it held around 100 tunes so most music lovers wouldn’t be able to afford it.
The music industry was definitely interested because of the CD’s great sound quality compared to vinyl’s and they figured that if they put around 12 songs on the disc it would end up with a reasonable price to consumers.
In order to sell CD’s the record industry needed the electronics industry to push CD players which was difficult at first because they cost around $1,000 but the price came down rapidly and in just six years CD sales surpassed vinyl.
What I think is interesting is that their original focus for the invention was all about music yet their invention migrated into a phenomenal piece of technology that ended up on all personal computers. After around 35 years of being invented I’m still burning CD’s; I find this incredible especially in the world of technology which seems to evolve daily.
One of the challenges they had was that their invention was well ahead of its time. The storage capacity of each disc was actually more than personal computers had at the time. With this in mind, it wasn’t too far off from the storage capacity of some of the original IPods so when they burned songs on the disc it held around 100 tunes so most music lovers wouldn’t be able to afford it.
The music industry was definitely interested because of the CD’s great sound quality compared to vinyl’s and they figured that if they put around 12 songs on the disc it would end up with a reasonable price to consumers.
In order to sell CD’s the record industry needed the electronics industry to push CD players which was difficult at first because they cost around $1,000 but the price came down rapidly and in just six years CD sales surpassed vinyl.
What I think is interesting is that their original focus for the invention was all about music yet their invention migrated into a phenomenal piece of technology that ended up on all personal computers. After around 35 years of being invented I’m still burning CD’s; I find this incredible especially in the world of technology which seems to evolve daily.
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