You may not remember this if you identify compact discs with the later 1980s, when they were readily available, but the very first commercially sold CD was Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, on Oct. Ever try cramming a CD in your pocket? I used to jam three or four into a pair of cargo shorts (without the cases, of course) if I was going to be on foot for three or four hours straight, a Sony CD Walkman with cutting-edge “skip” protection in my hand or hooked to a belt loop. The jewel cases CDs still most often come in are nearly six inches wide by five inches high (to say nothing of how scuffed, gouged and generally battered they can look over the years). ( MORE: The Next PlayStation: 5 Lessons I Hope Sony’s Learned)Ĭompact discs seem positively enormous nowadays: nearly five inches in diameter, or four times the width of Apple‘s stamp-sized iPad Shuffle, which at 2 GB storage can easily hold the audio content of 30 MP3-compressed CDs. If little analog, magnetized, write protect-notched rectangles of plastic (compact cassettes) could eventually supplant bulky eight-track tapes (Stereo 8), wasn’t a tinier compact disc the future of optical media? The MiniDisc almost made sense in the early 1990s: Compact discs were amazingly thin, but wider in diameter than cassette tapes, which predated them by over a decade. Follow time to bid a nostalgic farewell to Sony‘s MiniDisc format - those of you who remember it at all, anyway. After upwards of two decades, the MiniDisc is finally on the way out: The BBC reports that Sony plans to ship its final MiniDisc stereo system in March.
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