Cd's History

In 1980 Sony and Philips set the standard for the digital audio compact disc format. In 1982, the first Sony CD player called the CD-101 was released with Billy Joel's 52nd Street being the first musical production. With the success of CDs the first portable car players became available in 1984. Then, in 1985, the automatic CD changer with a carousel appeared on the market. In the 1990s, the industry began to adopt various storage standards to unify the plethora of hybrid CD formats perfected by third-party developers. These commonly agreed-upon formats were published in a set of coloured-cover books, becoming commonly known by their de facto names as the coloured-book standards. Today many formats are available for various applications such as computer data storage imaging interactive multimedia , multi-session data and audio with the most common of these being the digital audio format.

In 1995, work on standardising the emerging Digital Versatile Disc or DVD had begun. The final standard made public in late 1996 has now settled the heated discussions on what the final format would look like. There were talks of double-sided CDs and some speculation on single-sided double-density formats. Well the vote is in, and the format as listed by Sony is a single-sided dual-layer disc. Despite this, there is still talk of extending this to double-sided media by Hitachi.