It is 35 years since the first CD was printed at Philips' factory in Hanover. We celebrate by revealing five things, which you certainly did not know about the silver-colored disc.
When the first CD 35 years ago left Philips' factory in Germany, Hanover had several years of development work.
Along the way, the inventor Philips entered into a partnership with Japanese Sony, which resulted in some crucial adjustments to the CD's design.
5 surprising details about the CD:
Size
The Philips prototype on a CD was 11.5 cm in diameter and accommodated for one hour of music. But Sony would have longer playing time, and therefore the final edition took place for 73 minutes. At the same time, Sony demanded that the CD should fit in a Japanese shirt pocket 12 cm wide. Therefore, the CD got the same size.The size of the hole
Philips was allowed to determine the size of the hole in the middle, and it ended up fitting exactly to a Dutch 10 cent, which in Dutch is called a "double bullet".World's first CD player
Sony launched the world's first CD player CDP-101 on October 1, 1982, and a month later Philips was ready with their CD100 version.ABBA were the first
Shortly after the launch of the CD players, the first CD from Hanover came on the street. It was ABBA's album The Visitors, which the year before was launched on vinyl record.Streaming kills the CD
To date, more than 2.5 billion copies of the CD have been sold, but today the CD is gradually replaced by streaming services and MP3 downloads.
Thus, music on CD now accounts for only 6.3 percent of the Danish market while streaming is 80 percent of the market.
