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h, the CD — famous for its ability
to fend off honey and stones
when demonstrated on TV!
In retrospect, presenters’ insistence
on lashing out at shiny discs with whatever
came to hand to prove their toughness might
have been a mistake. This seemed to kick
off a myth that Tomorrow’s World had got
someone to play one covered in jam, and put
in people’s minds the notion that a CD would
play even if you first attacked it with random
components of next door’s rock garden. As
we soon all discovered to our disappointment,
neither of these things was true.You sound bitter. Still pining for 8-tracks,
vinyl and cassette tapes?
Not at all. The compact disc was a marvel
when it hit the mainstream. CD players
quickly shrank from the size of Sony’s
pioneering but monstrous CDP-101 to being
barely thicker than a couple of jewel cases,
and portable options rapidly replaced personal
cassette players prone to eating music rather
than playing it. You could instantly skip tracks
you hated, and recordable CDs later let you
create compilations at speed, rather than
being that bore in High Fidelity who spent
hours faffing about with a tape deck.But no one these days would bother with
that! Haven’t you heard of playlists?
Quite. The CD is very much on borrowed time,
as shown by sales in the USA dipping below
vinyl — something that last happened in
1986, when many people still thought Phil
Collins was cool. Vinyl does cheat, mind, in
being bolstered by Record Store Day – there’s
no such equivalent for digital discs. Still, retro
technology eventually comes around for a
second go, and so we imagine in a couple of
decades there’ll be a baffling hipster revival
of CDs — by which point hardly anyone will
own anything to play the things on.
[^ WordsC
ra
ig
G
ra
nnel
l^ ]The compact disc
A
RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES 1982Virgin
mega storage
When CDs arrived, the
650MB capacity blew
people’s minds. Mind you, it
was 1982, and cutting-edge
home computers boasted
of having 48k or 64k
of RAM.