The CD Celebrates Its 25th Birthday

The Compact Disc is officially twenty five years old today and it is still going strong despite the growth of digital downloads.

The first disc was produced on this day in 1982 after three years of development at a Philips factory in Germany and they went on sale to the public later that year in November.

The first music to be put on a CD was ‘The Visitors’ by Abba but it wasn’t until Dire Straits ‘Brothers In Arms’ that the format started to become popular.

Speaking to the BBC, Piet Kramer, who was part of the development team for the CD said: "When Philips teamed up with Sony to develop the CD, our first target was to win over the world for the CD.

"We did this by collaborating openly to agree on a new standard. For Philips, this open innovation was a new approach and it paid off."

The format was only supposed to last 20 to 25 years says senior engineer Jacques Heemskerk.

He added: "That was the model we had in mind although it seems that CD is going to last a lot longer than that. For many people the CD is still the original format, with others being derivative or back-ups."