7 ms·

The Compact Disc (1982) [video]

28 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

machinelabo 6y ago
Pay attention to how clearly information was presented in those days. I've not come across any media today that can present information in systematic and concise manner without trying hard to grab my attention, perhaps a handful of YT channels are an exception.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  A bit of survivorship bias here, if I may... the really crappy stuff from any non-current era does not get posted and reposted periodically here.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - donw 6y ago
    I don't think so. My father taught English, and had a long-standing rant about how universities since about the 80s or so produced writers that were amazingly talented at using a thousand words to say absolutely nothing.
  - 1shooner 6y ago
    Right, consider the thousands of hours of online technical training content on Udemy, etc. Much of that is very clear, well-paced, and precise. Conversely, watching any number of peppy newsreels on e.g. British Pathe[1]. They're just as blaring and superficial as any contemporary correlate. [1]https://www.britishpathe.com/ https://www.britishpathe.com/
    - machinelabo 6y ago
      It’s unfair to compare a college course to traditional TV media. College courses in the 80’s were similar to Coursera too. I urge you to watch news channels from the 80s. Literally every TV media was degraded from Discovery channel to History channel.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  40s naval engineering videos are the peak pedagogical value. It's ELI5 yet describing analog computing or sophisticated mechanical engineering devices. Then there's US college videos about waves and impedance.. another piece of beauty.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Especially worth watching the quote right at the end.
- djmips 6y ago
  Indeed, so prescient at the end but also at the end, for contrast, too newb to not keep their fingerprints off the read side of the disc!
dTal 6y ago
Wow, that laser looks enormous by today's standards! We take tiny, dirt cheap, diode lasers for granted now, but it really casts some perspective on how ambitious the format was in 1982. I do gain some wry amusement from all the business about "scratch-proof" and the way he said "it doesn't matter how much I manhandle the disk, it will continue to give very good quality" - while holding it gingerly from the edges! Of course we all know now that CDs must be treated with essentially the same care as vinyl records. Tape cassettes were the real durable format. (Bonus chuckle: the lady presenter at the end who has obviously taken "fingerprint-proof" at face value, holding up an absolutely filthy disc...) Very prescient prediction at the end; the obsolescence of the compact disc was indeed precipitated by the development of solid-state storage, over 20 years later. "Don't laugh!" she assures us. Indeed...
- agumonkey 6y ago
  minidiscs were also quite rugged.. a real pity that this format never blossomed
  - ace2358 6y ago
    My favourite medium ever. Still rocking one in my car, one in my home studio and one in my lounge entertainment unit. Only ceased production in 2019. I’m hoping it has a comeback like vinyl did! Haha but we all know that any medium that had a record function was killed my American music labels ;:
    - blackrock 6y ago
      I still have my old minidisc player. Exquisite piece of hardware mechanical engineering from Sony. I always enjoyed hearing that satisfying sound of inserting in the minidisc, and closing the door as the internal mechanisms aligns the media and prepares it for playback. Now that’s nostalgia.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Also DAT. (F the RIAA.) In production, ADAT using S-VHS tapes.
BadassFractal 6y ago
I clearly remember burning CDs up until around 2010, but I never realized that the technology was already around 30 years earlier. I still have rose-colored glasses nostalgia of the days of PC games in large cardboard boxes containing multi-CD jewel cases and elaborate manuals. I bet you the CD will come back as a vintage retro format in about 10-15 years when the kids who never grew up with them learn to treat it as a cool hipster format. Just like my generation did with vinyl, which I never experienced myself back in the day, having arrived too late on the scene. Friendly plug for LGR and 8 Bit Guy channels on Youtube who often dive back into these antique devices.
- z2 6y ago
  I was similarly amazed to learn that a couple of years ago, after borrowing a concert recording CD from a library marked "Recorded in West Germany ©1983." One that the disc was in such great condition after 3 decades, and two that I had modern devices still able to read it. The same could not be said for many other types of digital or analog media...
- the_af 6y ago
  8 Bit Guy is very cool. I'm saddened to hear the CD called a "retro format". Next you'll tell me the DVD is not the cool new thing from the future :( (Seriously though, I have a hard time dealing with people calling the CD retro. To me not even the audio tape is really old... I grew up listening to music on tapes, the CD was the new thing!)
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    I guess I'd say CD is and isn't retro. It's looking close to being the ultimate physical digital medium for music, with vinyl being the ultimate analog medium. It's really only retro in the sense that there isn't much reason to keep physical copies.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      It contains the uncompressed original audio stream! Where else can you get that?
jhunter1016 6y ago
It’s fascinating to me that the CD didn’t enter my household until the mid-90s. It speaks to exactly what the woman in the video said about cartridges and tapes. I can’t say that I know why it took more than a decade for CDs to become common place, but I do find it fascinating.
- bromuro 6y ago
  Well they were expensive... like 30€ a disk. cassettes were easy to duplicate and cheaper.
airhead969 6y ago
Diffraction gratings made optical laser disc media possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating#Examples https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm http://physics.randolphcollege.edu/lab/106_116lab/Laser/CD.htm http://physics.randolphcollege.edu/lab/106_116lab/Laser/CD.h...
mlok 6y ago
Full version (including history of sound recording devices) https://youtu.be/_Tx6TYnPat8 https://youtu.be/_Tx6TYnPat8
blindgeek 6y ago
I hated CDs. Too big to be carried in a pocket. Read-only, until CD-R came out. Single use, until CD-RW came out. Required careful handling, to avoid getting fingerprints on the read-side etc. In some ways not unlike vinyl, in its proneness to damage. Lastly, I had terrible luck with CD players and CD drives; they'd wear out after a couple years of heavy use. For me, CD was a step backward, lacking the robustness and convenience of cassette. As a medium of information exchange between computers, I can make a similar comparison between the CD and the 3.5-inch floppy. Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Those are nitpicks. The capacity (450x) and speed jumps (20% more at just 1X, to 7 MiB/s at 48X) from floppies to CDs was enormous. Vinyl doesn't have ECC, while most kinds of CD tracks do. CD-R was partially muti-use if not closed and adding another session. I never had a CD stand-alone player or computer CD writer or player wear-out. Sony Discman and Plextor burners. I was doing daily, multi-disc (9-10) backups to media and never had a problem. You must've been using cheap drives or unbalanced media at too high of a speed.
- Delk 6y ago
  > Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD. The use cases where each of those would be more convenient than the other are largely different. The CD had a capacity that you couldn't even begin to approach with any reasonable amount of floppies, and the read or write speeds of floppies would have made handling larger files rather cumbersome even if they had the capacity. If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD.
  - garaetjjte 6y ago
    >If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD. Well, later there was DVD-RAM which was essentially random-writable block device DVD. Orignally they even had floppy-like caddies: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DVD-RAM_FUJIFILM_Disc-removalble_With_cartridge-locking-pin.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DVD-RAM_...
seomint 6y ago
Scratch proof? Ha.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Especially the back. They fixed this with DVDs so the reflective layer is sandwiched between polycarbonate. Not sure if they could have pulled that off, though, seeing how big of an issue disc rot can be.
johbjo 6y ago
I have a theory that fashion (set design, clothes, makeup, UX) progresses as fast as the audio/video media begins to show age. Pictures are clearly dated by the media itself, which means the contents of the pictures are also inevitably dated. Fashion seemed to progress quickly during the 70s/80s and then begin to decelerate from the 90s onwards. It is more difficult now to date recordings from the 90s based only the audio/video quality which means it takes longer before it "feels old".
dehrmann 6y ago
Pretty impressive to see a 40-year-old technology still around with modern, popular devices still being shipped that can read the discs. Future technologies like DVD and Bluray using the same form factor was a huge reason, and despite what Neil Young would have you believe, 16 bits and 44kHz really is good enough for human perception.

28 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

Pay attention to how clearly information was presented in those days. I've not come across any media today that can present information in systematic and concise manner without trying hard to grab my attention, perhaps a handful of YT channels are an exception.

AshamedCaptain 6y ago
A bit of survivorship bias here, if I may... the really crappy stuff from any non-current era does not get posted and reposted periodically here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- donw 6y ago
  I don't think so. My father taught English, and had a long-standing rant about how universities since about the 80s or so produced writers that were amazingly talented at using a thousand words to say absolutely nothing.
- 1shooner 6y ago
  Right, consider the thousands of hours of online technical training content on Udemy, etc. Much of that is very clear, well-paced, and precise. Conversely, watching any number of peppy newsreels on e.g. British Pathe[1]. They're just as blaring and superficial as any contemporary correlate. [1]https://www.britishpathe.com/ https://www.britishpathe.com/
  - machinelabo 6y ago
    It’s unfair to compare a college course to traditional TV media. College courses in the 80’s were similar to Coursera too. I urge you to watch news channels from the 80s. Literally every TV media was degraded from Discovery channel to History channel.
agumonkey 6y ago
40s naval engineering videos are the peak pedagogical value. It's ELI5 yet describing analog computing or sophisticated mechanical engineering devices. Then there's US college videos about waves and impedance.. another piece of beauty.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Especially worth watching the quote right at the end.

djmips 6y ago
Indeed, so prescient at the end but also at the end, for contrast, too newb to not keep their fingerprints off the read side of the disc!

dTal 6y ago

Wow, that laser looks enormous by today's standards! We take tiny, dirt cheap, diode lasers for granted now, but it really casts some perspective on how ambitious the format was in 1982. I do gain some wry amusement from all the business about "scratch-proof" and the way he said "it doesn't matter how much I manhandle the disk, it will continue to give very good quality" - while holding it gingerly from the edges! Of course we all know now that CDs must be treated with essentially the same care as vinyl records. Tape cassettes were the real durable format. (Bonus chuckle: the lady presenter at the end who has obviously taken "fingerprint-proof" at face value, holding up an absolutely filthy disc...) Very prescient prediction at the end; the obsolescence of the compact disc was indeed precipitated by the development of solid-state storage, over 20 years later. "Don't laugh!" she assures us. Indeed...

agumonkey 6y ago
minidiscs were also quite rugged.. a real pity that this format never blossomed
- ace2358 6y ago
  My favourite medium ever. Still rocking one in my car, one in my home studio and one in my lounge entertainment unit. Only ceased production in 2019. I’m hoping it has a comeback like vinyl did! Haha but we all know that any medium that had a record function was killed my American music labels ;:
  - blackrock 6y ago
    I still have my old minidisc player. Exquisite piece of hardware mechanical engineering from Sony. I always enjoyed hearing that satisfying sound of inserting in the minidisc, and closing the door as the internal mechanisms aligns the media and prepares it for playback. Now that’s nostalgia.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Also DAT. (F the RIAA.) In production, ADAT using S-VHS tapes.

BadassFractal 6y ago

I clearly remember burning CDs up until around 2010, but I never realized that the technology was already around 30 years earlier. I still have rose-colored glasses nostalgia of the days of PC games in large cardboard boxes containing multi-CD jewel cases and elaborate manuals. I bet you the CD will come back as a vintage retro format in about 10-15 years when the kids who never grew up with them learn to treat it as a cool hipster format. Just like my generation did with vinyl, which I never experienced myself back in the day, having arrived too late on the scene. Friendly plug for LGR and 8 Bit Guy channels on Youtube who often dive back into these antique devices.

z2 6y ago
I was similarly amazed to learn that a couple of years ago, after borrowing a concert recording CD from a library marked "Recorded in West Germany ©1983." One that the disc was in such great condition after 3 decades, and two that I had modern devices still able to read it. The same could not be said for many other types of digital or analog media...
the_af 6y ago
8 Bit Guy is very cool. I'm saddened to hear the CD called a "retro format". Next you'll tell me the DVD is not the cool new thing from the future :( (Seriously though, I have a hard time dealing with people calling the CD retro. To me not even the audio tape is really old... I grew up listening to music on tapes, the CD was the new thing!)
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I guess I'd say CD is and isn't retro. It's looking close to being the ultimate physical digital medium for music, with vinyl being the ultimate analog medium. It's really only retro in the sense that there isn't much reason to keep physical copies.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    It contains the uncompressed original audio stream! Where else can you get that?

jhunter1016 6y ago

It’s fascinating to me that the CD didn’t enter my household until the mid-90s. It speaks to exactly what the woman in the video said about cartridges and tapes. I can’t say that I know why it took more than a decade for CDs to become common place, but I do find it fascinating.

bromuro 6y ago
Well they were expensive... like 30€ a disk. cassettes were easy to duplicate and cheaper.

airhead969 6y ago

Diffraction gratings made optical laser disc media possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_grating#Examples https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cd.htm http://physics.randolphcollege.edu/lab/106_116lab/Laser/CD.htm http://physics.randolphcollege.edu/lab/106_116lab/Laser/CD.h...

mlok 6y ago

Full version (including history of sound recording devices) https://youtu.be/_Tx6TYnPat8 https://youtu.be/_Tx6TYnPat8

blindgeek 6y ago

I hated CDs. Too big to be carried in a pocket. Read-only, until CD-R came out. Single use, until CD-RW came out. Required careful handling, to avoid getting fingerprints on the read-side etc. In some ways not unlike vinyl, in its proneness to damage. Lastly, I had terrible luck with CD players and CD drives; they'd wear out after a couple years of heavy use. For me, CD was a step backward, lacking the robustness and convenience of cassette. As a medium of information exchange between computers, I can make a similar comparison between the CD and the 3.5-inch floppy. Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD.

airhead969 6y ago
Those are nitpicks. The capacity (450x) and speed jumps (20% more at just 1X, to 7 MiB/s at 48X) from floppies to CDs was enormous. Vinyl doesn't have ECC, while most kinds of CD tracks do. CD-R was partially muti-use if not closed and adding another session. I never had a CD stand-alone player or computer CD writer or player wear-out. Sony Discman and Plextor burners. I was doing daily, multi-disc (9-10) backups to media and never had a problem. You must've been using cheap drives or unbalanced media at too high of a speed.
Delk 6y ago
> Aside from their limited space, I much preferred the floppy to the CD. The use cases where each of those would be more convenient than the other are largely different. The CD had a capacity that you couldn't even begin to approach with any reasonable amount of floppies, and the read or write speeds of floppies would have made handling larger files rather cumbersome even if they had the capacity. If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD.
- garaetjjte 6y ago
  >If you had a 20 kilobyte Word file or perhaps even a few smallish image files that you wanted to transfer, a floppy would of course be much, much more convenient than going through all the trouble of burning a CD. Well, later there was DVD-RAM which was essentially random-writable block device DVD. Orignally they even had floppy-like caddies: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DVD-RAM_FUJIFILM_Disc-removalble_With_cartridge-locking-pin.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/DVD-RAM_...

seomint 6y ago

Scratch proof? Ha.

dehrmann 6y ago
Especially the back. They fixed this with DVDs so the reflective layer is sandwiched between polycarbonate. Not sure if they could have pulled that off, though, seeing how big of an issue disc rot can be.

johbjo 6y ago

I have a theory that fashion (set design, clothes, makeup, UX) progresses as fast as the audio/video media begins to show age. Pictures are clearly dated by the media itself, which means the contents of the pictures are also inevitably dated. Fashion seemed to progress quickly during the 70s/80s and then begin to decelerate from the 90s onwards. It is more difficult now to date recordings from the 90s based only the audio/video quality which means it takes longer before it "feels old".

dehrmann 6y ago

Pretty impressive to see a 40-year-old technology still around with modern, popular devices still being shipped that can read the discs. Future technologies like DVD and Bluray using the same form factor was a huge reason, and despite what Neil Young would have you believe, 16 bits and 44kHz really is good enough for human perception.