The Big Bang of the digital audio revolution occurred exactly 25 years ago, on the 17th of August, 1982. This was the day that a Philips factory in Langenhagen, Germany, pressed the very first commercial Compact Disc, and propelled the world forward into the digital age of music.

The idea of a Compact Disc was first conceived of in 1969, but serious research wasn’t started until almost a decade later in 1977. Another two years later, in 1979, Philips teamed up with Sony to create an ominous sounding joint task force of engineers to create a new digital audio storage disc. The result of the year long collaboration was the (somewhat) famous “Red Book,” a color-bound book containing the agreed on technical specifications for all future Compact Discs.

With everything else agreed on, it was only a matter of time before the first band agreed to have their material pressed onto Compact Discs. The very first title to be released out of the Langenhagen factory on August 17th , 1982, was ABBA’s 1981 album The Visitors.

Not too long after the introduction of Compact Discs, the industry saw a plethora of variations of the shiny optical disc: the CD-ROM (1985), the CD-Recordable (1990), the MiniDisc (1992), the CD-ReWritable (1997), to name a few. Compact Discs turned out to be the launching pad for the digital music revolution, which not only introduced easy data storage, but also brought us a dark side. Lossless copying, mindless music sharing, and poorly encoded MP3 all paved the road to the music industries’ current DRM-laden, paranoid state. Regardless of the present, however, the Compact Disc was an amazing invention, and deserves recognition as such.

Happy Birthday, Compact Disc!