History Of The CD
The digital compact disc, now commonplace in stereos and computers, was invented in the late 1960s by James T. Russell
In 1965, when Columbus, Ohio - based Battelle Memorial Institute opened its Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Russell joined the effort as Senior Scientist. He already knew what avenue of research he wanted to pursue.
Alone at home on a Saturday afternoon, Russell began to sketch out a better music recording system --- and was inspired with a truly revolutionary idea Russell envisioned a system that would record and replay sounds without physical contact between its parts; and he saw that the best way to achieve such a system was to use light.
Battelle let Russell pursue the project, and after years of work, Russell succeeded in inventing the first digital-to-optical recording and playback system (patented in 1970). This was the first compact disc.
Through the 1970s, Russell continued to refine the CD-ROM, adapting it to any form of data. Like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first; but eventually, Sony and other audio companies realized the implications and purchased licenses.
By 1985, Russell had earned 26 patents for CD-ROM technology. The compact disk came into popularity when it was mass manufactured by Philips in 1980.
Understanding the CD
CD: Compact Disc, a digital medium formed of a 12cm polycarbonate substrate, a reflective metalized layer, and a protective lacquer coating. The physical format of CDs is described by the ISO9660 industry standard. CD-Recordable discs also have an organic dye data layer between the substrate and the metal reflective layer.
CD-R: Compact Disc-Recordable. This term is used to describe the technology of recordable CD as well as the equipment, software and media used to make recordable discs.
A related technology called CD-Rewritable (CD-RW) allows you to erase discs and reuse them, but the CD-RW media doesn't work in all players. CD-Rewritable drives are able to write both CD-R and CD-RW discs.
CD-ROM: Compact Disc Read Only Memory. A compact disc format that is used to hold text, graphics and hi-fi stereo sound. The disc is almost the same as the music CD, but uses different tracks for data. The music CD player cannot play CD ROM discs, but most CD-ROM players are able to play CD discs. A CD-ROM player is cabled to and controlled by a card that is plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots. A CD ROM can hold 650 Mb of data, which is equivalent to about 250,000 pages of text or 20,000 medium-resolution images.
Media or Blanks: CD-Recordable media are the discs used to record digital information using a special recorder and premastering software with a computer. These discs are made of a polycarbonate substrate, a layer of organic dye, a metalized reflective layer, and a protective lacquer coating. Some discs also have an additional protective coating over the metalized layer, and some discs have a printable surface silkscreened on them.
MP3: The format is a compression system for music. This format helps to reduce the number of bytes in a song, without hurting the quality of the song's sound. The goal of the MP3 format is to compress a CD-quality song by a factor of 10 to 14, without losing the CD sound quality. A 32 megabyte (MB) song on a CD compresses down to about 3 MB on MP3. This lets you download a song in minutes rather than hours, and you can store 10 to 20 songs on an MP3 player using a relatively small amount of memory. Many people who start collecting MP3 files find that they want to listen to them in all kinds of places. Small, portable MP3 players answer this demand. These players are like portable cassette or CD players, except that they are smaller and they use solid state memory instead of a physical medium like a tape or a CD. All of the players currently on the market include a software application that lets you transfer your MP3 files into the player. Most of them also include utilities for copying music from CDs or Web sites, and the ability to create custom playlists.
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