25 years ago, on the 17th of august 1982 to be exact, the first Compact Disc was shipped from Hannover in Germany. A symphony by Richard Strauss was digitally mastered and recorded. For a long time Philips and Sony had cooperated in developing what they thought was going to revolutionize the music industry. Tired of broken records and crackling sound after playing your new record a couple of times? Well, this shiny little disc was to end this they claimed.

But of course, the most important use of the compact disc was not for music at all. The CD was the enabler for multimedia on the PC. At last it was possible to store large amount of data on very little space. Remember that the harddrives in the tens of Gigabyte size was not something you could expect to see sitting inside your personal computer.

The possibility to store several hundred diskettes worth of data on a single disk made it possible to make programs and operating systems that contained advanced graphics, videos and GUIs that would be impractical to ship on diskettes.

But the shiny little disc may not live for another 25 years. As for music, online distribution is about to be a real alternative. And when music players starts to ship with built in memory card readers, the CD will meet a though competitor. And it is already some time ago since I last got any software on a CD. Even the SwyxWare CD I never use, it is always downloaded from Swyx.com.