CD Replication History
As far back as 1977 the Philips electronics group started research into laser disc and optical disc technology. Early laserdiscs did not really catch on with consumers and therefore in 1979 Philips teamed up with the Sony Corporation to develop a new digital audio disc format. After around 12 months the joint research and development team unveiled Compact Disc and Red Book Standard. Nearly 30 years on this red book standard is still the set of specifications that all audio CDs are manufactured to.
Philips were the first manufacturer to produce commercially available audio CDs at their German based factory in 1982. The first ever album released on the new CD format was "The Visitors" by ABBA. Sony's efforts concentrated on producing a CD player that would conform to the new red book standard and reliably playback the Philips manufactured CDs. The first ever CD player was released by Sony in the Autumn of 1982 just in time to play the first ever Philips CD albums. The CD audio format was well and truely born.
A few years later Sony and Philips realised the potential for storing computer data on to a CD and in 1985 they jointly produced the Yellow book standard for CDROM. Again almost 25 years on this the same yellow book specification used for today's CDROM's. Other book standards followed such as blue book for CD extra and orange book for the new recordable CDs that Sony, Philips and Taiyo Yueden developed in the early 90's
