Philips Unveils Compact Disc: Music Goes Digital

Philips engineers demonstrated the Compact Disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands, on March 8, 1979, showing a small, shiny disc that could store over an hour of music read by a laser beam. The technology was jointly developed with Sony, whose engineer Atsushi Ohashi proposed the 120mm disc diameter that would become standard. The CD stored audio as a stream of ones and zeros, immune to the pops, clicks, and degradation that plagued vinyl records and cassette tapes. Commercial production began in 1982, with Billy Joel's 52nd Street as the first album released on CD. Within a decade, CDs had largely replaced both vinyl and cassettes, peaking at 2.5 billion units sold in 2000. The technology also spawned CD-ROMs for computer data, transforming software distribution and creating the multimedia PC era. The same digital encoding principles that made the CD possible eventually led to MP3 compression and streaming services that would, ironically, render the physical disc itself obsolete.