Happy 25th Birthday, Compact Discs

The BBC carried an interesting history of the development of the Compact Disc yesterday, the 25th anniversary of the production of the first CD. Apparently one of the alternative names for the new product was “Mini Rack”. Designers at Philips went with Compact Disc because they thought it reminiscent of the compact cassette, which was then considered a successful and innovative product. Philips and Sony worked collaboratively on the development, establishing industry standards.

The fact I found most interesting:

“Philips’ plan for a CD with a 11.5cm diameter had to be changed when Sony insisted that a disc must hold all of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The longest recording of the symphony in record label Polygram’s archive was 74 minutes and so the CD size was increased to 12cm diameter to accommodate the extra data.”

I have to believe that fact is going to come in useful in a game of Trivial Pursuit or “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” at some point.

Other items of note:

* “The first commercial CDs pressed were ‘The Visitors’ by Abba and a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss.”

* Dire Straits’ ‘Brothers In Arms’ became the first CD to sell more than one million copies, in 1985.

* “In 2000 global sales of CD albums peaked at 2.455 billion. In 2006 that figure was down to 1.755 billion.”