The CD is 25 years old

SEEMS LIKE EVERY TIME you turn around, there's another anniversary of something technological. The other day it was the ThinkPad but today is a big one, according to newswire AFP, because it's 25 years since the first CDs were manufactured.

As with many inventions, we were sold a pup with the CD. The old buffers' guide was that these shiny circles would last for ever and always sound crystal clear. But they fell a long way short of lasting forever and a lot of old recordings were slapped down on CD with all the old hiss, wobble, vrrr, farp, muddle, wibble and other sounds intact. Some audiophiles complained that even on good recordings the CD lacks the timbre of the best vinyl output. Is that last an imaginary problem? You tell me.

It took a while for CD to catch on. I remember walking down to the Virgin store in Eldon Square, Newcastle when the first CDs were on display, around about 1985. You could have Dire Straits's Brothers In Arms or Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms so everybody complained. We should have shut up because they started reissuing Pink Floyd. Ho-Hum.

My beef with the format was that the CD covers lacked the sufficient real estate to cope with the acres of witterings of artists. Poems, lyric sheets, baffling dedications to roadies, groupies and so forth were gone, all gone. The clever designs of the LP generation were also much traduced. How the hell were you going to replicate the fold-out desk from Alice Cooper's School's Out album? Or gain the full impact of all those Yes covers? Or Hendrix's Are You Experienced?

At the time, a lot of people thought that Digital Compact Cassette or DAT would make audio CD a five-year wonder but it has lasted pretty well, all things considered, and now we've done the painful shift from our vinyl and cassette collections, a lot of us don't want to shift.

In 1985, the Yellow Book format made CD-ROM a data storage medium although it wasn't until the early 1990s that CD drives were widely built into PCs. In the UK, Gateway 2000 made an early move and it wasn't long before PC Magazine replaced the cover floppy with the cover CD, even if early packages only had a few megabytes of freebies.

Today, of course the DVD, Blu-Ray and HD DVD have made the CD-ROM something of a fossil and with web music storage getting so free and easy, the kids already look at your discs the way you looked at your old uncle's 78s. I like the web for storage but I can't abide it for music. I still want the full silver sound, so the CDs are staying on the shelf. Happy birthday CD, 25's no age at all to be leaving this earth. µ