CheapSlider

Today (17 Aug) is the 25th birthday of the CD.

The first Compact Disc for commercial release rolled off the assembly line on August 17, 1982, at a Philips factory in Langenhagen, near Hanover, Germany.

bbc report from 1983

We don't hear so much nowadays about coating CDs with marmalade.

Hero999

It's the 19th August today.

£500 for a CD player back in 83? I don't know what that would be in today's money but it's a lot.

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Hank Fletcher

Although I didn't make much of it at the time (I don't know if anyone did), the CD probably symbolized better than anything else the popular shift into a digital age. I relate to the CD more as a music medium than a digital storage format, in the sense that my first relation to CDs was as a replacement for vinyl or tape albums. It's because of the impact that CDs had (or perhaps merely represent) on the reception of a formerly analog, social activity like music that as an artifact it symbolizes the analog to digital shift so well.

Inherent to the size and packaging of music CDs was the reduction in printed material in comparison to that of vinyl records. This drastically changed the nature of what an album was by diminishing the literal and graphic associations connected with any given release. There was about a decade of limbo between CDs as a popular music format in the late 1980s, to the mass popularity of the Internet in the late 1990s, when anything you wanted to know about a CD's contents was limited to the material printed on its liner notes (and in rare cases included in files on the CD).

All this influences how we perceive music socially, i.e. how we talk about music. The packaging to a vinyl record was a poster, a flag, for the army of a rock band's fans. A CD limits the army to those with 20/20 vision willing to squint to see a visual message, and to be honest, a CD is awkward and embarrassing to both have autographed or autograph.

So the CD doesn't just represent a shift from an analog to digital medium. It also represents a shift in emphasis in the literal and visual associations with a music artificact, and also a context for comparing a social activity's worth (e.g. as a medium, a CD might contain music, a video, an encyclopedia, or a game). Perhaps the more notable change though is towards how something like music is perceived. Rather than a cohesive representation of what a musician or music group is all about, the CD expects that the listener will (if necessary) supplement their understanding through other means, e.g. visiting the band's website. This is a fragmentation of the social, listening experience not only in the diversity in attention anticipated in the listener, but moreover in the popular reception of music as an individual experience (i.e. downloading to your iPod) as oppose to a group socialization (i.e. attending a concert).

mvs sarma

Nice that CD has completed 25 years but i heard, IF I AM RIGHT, some unpleasant news about the inventer of CD.
as rightly pointed out-- the CD and CD players have become so cheap.

being slowly taken over by USB memories- of course , smaller capaccities as compared to CD or DVD for that matter.

Sarma

Hero999

But doesn't the CD represent one of the largest orders of magnitudes of storage capacity ever?

A disc that could store 650MB of data back in 1982 must have been amazing considering that hard disks took another 10 years to reach a similar capacity and then another 5 years before everyone had them. Alright I understand that CDs were read only at first but it's still pretty amazing.

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Sceadwian

My 4 gig USB keychain has less physical mass than a CD or DVD does, and they're getting bigger and cheaper by the month. Smaller ones are given away by companies frequently like pen's, containing things like their product line in PDF format. I don't think it will ever replace the CD/DVD physical format, but as a re-writeable portable and compact data format it's growing to be as important and influential as the CD, maybe moreso because they're USB based, another one of those big paradigm shifters =)

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mvs sarma

Nice to know abt 4Gig usb drive-I forgot , thati saw oce a 10GB pendrive- witha facility to swap the memory device(SD Memory type)- the pen drive wacting as a interface with nominal capacity of its own.

CD has one advantage of being a passive device-- except for scratches and non-portability in case of disturbed or old CD drives-- alignment issues.

Sarma

rmn_tech

How long before the flash drive replaces the hard drive ?

With USB sticks of 8 Gigs now on sale, Like the universe flash memory sizes just keep expanding, eventually they will replace the hard drive.

Nigel Goodwin

They aren't fast enough though (are they?).

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ThermalRunaway

The Amiga was one of the first to take advantage of this with the CDTV Computer. It was way ahead of it's time and went largely unnoticed by the computing public. I think I might be correct in saying the CDTV was the first HOME computer to be sold with a CDROM drive as standard?

Brian

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dknguyen

Don't they also die? They have a writing lifetime rather than harddrive which has a running lifetime...not sure which one woudl last longer in the real world. I'm not sure how often something is written to a HD when I'm using my PC.

Sceadwian

Flash drives can be significantly faster than a hard drive, but especially with the high capacity devices the read/write cycles are limited. The technology might become as reliable as an HD eventually, but it's not there yet. It's also easier to run them in parallel such as an HD with built in RAID for performance without the clunky physical constraints.

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kchriste

Never. Why? Micro$oft will always push the limits on storage requirements! It's the same with all PC hardware; build it and the software developers will eventually bring that former PC screamer to it's knees.
A lot! Virtual memory managers, the M$ indexing service, etc are always thrashing the HD. Though I have seen Linux distros that are designed to boot and run from a USB memory stick.

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Hero999

Flash memory could be in theory faster than hard disks.

The operating system should be stored on flash as it doesn't need to be changed very often and the hard disk should by used for your personal information. There should be no need for virtual memory in this day and age, the only reason why it's used is because software is so bloated.

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What's so bad about Microsoft?

Get Opera it's simply a superb browser.

ThermalRunaway

The operating system doesn't need to change very often unless we're talking about Windows. Although technically, you can't define Windows as an Operating System at all unless you want to call it a very bad one!

Brian

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Electronics Test Development Engineer
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