【明報專訊】On 2 March 1983 Compact Discs (CDs) were first released in the US and Europe. continued to this day.

The event is a milestone in the Digital Revolution, which has continued to this day.

History of CDs

CDs used to store music and data were invented more than 30 years ago. James T Russell, an American inventor, is credited with inventing the first system to record digital information on an optical transparent foil. His patents (專利權) were acquired in the 1980s by Philips and Sony, which had set up a joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the Red Book CD-DA standard.

On 1 October 1982, the first 50 CD titles were released in Japan. They included 52nd Street (by American singer-songwriter Billy Joel, picture). The first CD player, Sony's CDP-101, was released the same day. That was followed by the introduction of CD players and discs to Europe and North America (where CBS Records, Sony's recorded music subsidiary, released sixteen titles) in March 1983.

The new format gained popularity rapidly. In the UK, Dire Straits, a British rock band, released Brothers in Arms in 1985. It was one of the first CDs produced from a digital master made from digital recordings.

DVDs and Blu-ray discs

CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs are all plastic discs of the same size, but they differ greatly in storage capacity. The DVD was invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic in 1995. A single-sided, single-layered DVD stores up to 4.7 GB of digital data. Conventional Blu-ray discs contain up to 25 GB per layer.

The Digital Revolution

The advent of the CD, DVD and Blu-ray disc is only one of the many aspects of the Digital Revolution, which is often compared to the Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution. One need not look further than the technological advances we embrace today: 4G mobile network, smartphones, tablet computers, cloud-computing, etc.

Many forces have been fuelling the Digital Revolution. They include the development of the digital electronic computer, the personal computer and, particularly, the microprocessor with its steadily increasing performance. According to the Moore's Law (摩爾定律), named after Gordon E Moore, the co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, the number of transistors (晶體管) in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

The emergence of technological breakthroughs is often accompanied by the rapid decline of older technologies. For example, the popularity of WhatsApp is making Short Message Service (SMS) increasingly obsolete (過時的). Fax machines, payphones, Plasma displays are things expected to disappear soon.

Positive aspects

No doubt we all benefit from the Digital Revolution. We have now greater interconnectedness and easier communication, sharing and storage of information. But for the World Wide Web (WWW), globalisation would not have become as feasible as it is now. The Digital Revolution has changed the way individuals and companies interact, as small regional companies now have access to much larger markets. Rapidly dropping technology costs have made possible innovations in all aspects of industry and everyday life.

Negative aspects

The Digital Revolution, like many other technological advances, is a double-edged sword. Information overload, Internet predators, forms of social isolation and media saturation are among some of its problems. Another big issue that merits our concern is privacy since, with the ability to store and utilise large amounts of diverse information, it is possible to track individuals' activities.