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| CED in the History of Media Technology | ||||||||||||||
On October 1, 1982 Sony introduced the CDP-101, the first Compact Disc audio CD player on the market at a retail price of about $900. In contrast to the analog audio playback products up to that time, the Compact Disc was digital, reconstructing sound from a rapid stream of 1's and 0's stored sequentially on the disc. This first player was designated CDP-101 rather than the more likely CDP-100 in reference to an alternating binary string like 101101101.
Later the compact disc standard was expanded to include CD-ROM for use as random access computer data storage. Still later, CD-R and CD-R/W emerged for one-time and rewritable recording onto compact discs. In the late 1990's this inexpensive media allowed optical storage to eclipse magnetic media like floppy and ZIP discs for backup and transportation of data.