Happy Birthday CD

Happy Birthday Compact Disc. We hardly knew ye.
It has been 25 years since the first compact disc was pressed. Philips and Sony, the patent holders I think, inform the world that the very first CD rolled off the production lines on August 17th, 1982. It was a copy of ABBA’s The Visitors. From hit CD to hit nostalgia Broadway and West End play.
Wow, you would have thought it was longer than that. I still remember having my first glass master made in the early 90’s for over $1,000. We used to have to wait for Celine Dion to get off the disc duplicating machines for our library databases to be copied! She’d cut a million and we took the minimum order – 250 and recycled most of them. I remember how much money we saved when disc-cutters were affordable.
Nostalga rules. I wonder when we’ll see the CD Museum stores – like the vinyl museum stores I used to see? I guess they’ve mostly gone online like used bookstores for niche markets. In an eerie coincidence, Sunday, August 12th was Vinyl Record Day. It marks the anniversary of Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877. So that made it 130 years old last Sunday.
Still, 200 billion discs have been sold worldwide. I know that the transition to MP3 hasn’t been smooth but who knows what’s next – uplink? HAL?
Process trumps containers it appears. And paper persists.
Stephen
[Who still has boxes of 45’s, 78’s, 8-tracks, cassettes, Beta, VHS, and, yes, vinyl (and a copy of the first CD I ever pubished for my Christmas tree). I did try to sell my old 8088 PC to NASA.]