Overnight, the quality of music improved almost immeasurably, while the
medium itself was nearly impervious to damage. Remember that old vinyl
records were played by having a needle physically touching the tracks; over
time the record would wear out, and a scratch could render the album use-
less. The CD, on the other hand, is read by a laser beam that never physically
touches the disc. And so, properly stored, a CD has a much longer life than
vinyl. CDs were an immediate success among consumers, and soon factories
were pressing millions of copies of the latest offerings from Abba, the Eagles,
and Frank Sinatra. The more music that was sold in CD form, the lower the
cost of production of players and media, and that success subsidized the
transition to computer use.The other part of the story is that the recording method for a CD is digital
instead of analog — one of the first applications of that sort of technology to a
consumer product. This allowed for CD players that could use all sorts of elec-
tronic magic to process and improve the sound before it was finally converted
to an analog signal and played through a set of speakers or headphones.It was the digital storage scheme, though, that made the CD immediately
attractive to computer manufacturers. It was a perfect way to store huge
amounts of data that are kept in digital form anyhow. Suddenly a 1.44MB high-
density floppy disk seemed puny when compared to a 600MB or 700MB CD.The first trick was to find a way to shrink the size, weight, and power con-
sumption of a CD player from a 10-pound shoebox to a 6-ounce plastic tray
that could be built in to a computer or laptop. Once again the consumer side
of the market took the lead: Products like the Sony Walkman and competitors
quickly shrank the CD to a portable form.The first use of CDs in laptops, then, was as a means to load operating sys-
tems and software onto the hard disk (spelled with a k) drive. CDs arrived
too late for the very first few generations of laptops, but CD players were
common by the mid-1990s. In addition to software delivery, engineers also
added audio cards to allow portable computers to become highly sophisti-
cated and somewhat expensive music players. Along with the music came
large computer games delivered on CDs.Then the emphasis switched back to the computer side: Engineers worked on
finding ways to allow users to burn their own CDs as a form of personal stor-
age. The arrival of the CD-R (CD recorder) began, once again with larger units
for desktop computers; they quickly shrank to fit in laptop machines. The
same pattern occurred with DVDs, whose almost-forgotten meaning is digital
video disc;more recently, the official translation of the acronym was changed
to digital versatile disc,but almost no one calls it anything but a DVD. DVDs
first arrived in homes as a medium to carry movies; they are similar in con-
cept to CDs but have a much larger capacity — large enough to hold several
hours of video and audio.146 Part III: Laying Hands on the Major Parts