On August 17, 1982, Royal Philips Electronics manufactured the world's first CD at its factory outside Hannover, Germany. The birth of CD heralded the arrival of a new era in the music industry - relying on its excellent sound quality and better durability to promote the music industry from analog to digital technology. The CD became a catalyst for further innovation in digital entertainment, paving the way for later DVDs and now blue-violet laser DVDs.

The factory where Philips built the world's first CD in Germany belonged to PolyGram Records - the record company was still owned by Philips at the time. The first CDs were launched on the market in November 1982, with approximately 150 albums, mostly classical music. The first CD player, Philips' CD100, was launched in Japan in November 1982 and entered the European and American markets in March of the following year.

Philips and Sony collaborated to develop CDs. Starting in August 1979, Sony and Philips' R&D teams, physicists and sound engineers went to each other's laboratories in Tokyo and Eindhoven to study respectively. . In this competitive learning, the potential of both parties has been further explored. The two parties are not only partners who learn from each other and create specifications, but also competitors who chase each other. Most decisions were made in the second year, such as platter size and so on. The original storage capacity design target was one hour of audio content, in which case a diameter of 115 mm would be enough. The capacity was later expanded to 74 minutes to fully accommodate Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. By June 1980, the Digital Audio Disc Association adopted the Red Book submitted by Philips and Sony - including the technical specifications required for all CD and CD-Rom standards.

Piet Kramer, a member of the Philips optical team at the time, commented on the cooperation between Philips and Sony: "When Philips and Sony jointly developed CDs, our primary goal was to surpass all other standards at the time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had no idea that the computer and entertainment industries would one day also choose digital CDs to store their growing applications, data and movies."

Senior Vice President of Philips Consumer Electronics. Lucas Covers, chief marketing officer, said: "The CD has proven its importance in providing consumers with truly high-quality music. The huge success of the CD over the past 25 years has also brought more opportunities to consumers, Allowing them to create their own music at home; CD also played an important role in the transformation of music from analog to digital, not only for the later DVD, but also for the current blue-violet laser technology. ”

CD technology is actually the ancestor of our current large optical disc family, which includes CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD R, DVD RW, and blue-violet laser discs.

According to Philips estimates, in the 25 years since the birth of the CD, 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide. If these CDs were stacked, their height would be enough to circle the earth six times.