The Hindu : National : CD is 25 years old

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Sunday, Aug 19, 2007
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National

CD is 25 years old

Special Correspondent

200 billion CDs sold since 1982
Users moving over to DVDs

Bangalore: The Compact Disk or CD — the laser-etched, plastic-coated aluminium platter that kick-started the era of digital music and data recording — is 25 years old this week.

It was on August 17,1982, that the world’s first music CD rolled off the assembly line in a factory near Hannover in Germany, owned by Philips, the Dutch company that co-developed the new recording technology with Japan-based Sony.

Music lovers ditched cassette tapes (and their perennial problem of entangling and data loss) for the hardy new disks which could stand a lot of rough handling — even as they improved the quality of music reproduced.

The technology of the music CD was soon modified to create the CD-ROM (for read only memory) which quickly became the de facto recording and portable storage medium for the personal computer. The total sale of CDs now exceed 200 billion; but after the turn of the century, CDs which could hold about 650 megabytes of data or 70 minutes of video, saw a drop in demand as buyers moved to the Digital Versatile Disk or DVD with an almost seven-fold increase in capacity.

Interestingly, the world’s second largest maker of optical storage devices such as CDs and DVDs is an Indian undertaking — Moser Baer — which rolls out over 3.2 billion disks a year from its plant in Noida near Delhi.

The company has already moved to the next era of the high density DVD which kicks up the storage capacity of each platter to over 25 gigabytes. It is operating internationally certified production processes for both competing high density DVD standards — HD DVD and Blu ray.

The company plans to market high density DVDs in India under its own brand in 2008 or 2009, as and when the domestic demand builds up.

Looking back on the long road of the CD, Ratul Puri, Moser Baer’s executive director, told The Hindu on Saturday: “The Compact Disk and other optical media continue to be the lowest cost storage media for consumers. Mose r Baer has been part of the optical industry since the past decade and is now one of the largest manufacturers of optical media and a leader in the technology development in this industry.”

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