The CD is 25 years old today!

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On August 17, 1982, Philips manufactured the world's first compact disc, so it's 25 today. For those of you who think the world was in black and white back then too, here's some trivia to educate you ;-)

  • The CD was jointly developed by Philips and Sony
  • The first CD players cost about UK£1000/$2000/€1440 at today's rate (!)
  • More than 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide
  • The companies targetted a disc which could hold an hour of audio. The capacity was extended to 74 minutes, however, to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, forcing the disk to be made slightly larger

Interestingly the engineers envisaged the format lasting about 20-25 years.