First CD manufactured in Philips’ Hanover plant on August 17, 1982.

It’s probably hard to believe but the iconic compact disc turns 25 years old today. The first disc was pressed on this day in 1982 at Philips’ Langenhagen factory, just outside Hanover, Germany.

That first disc was “The Visitors” by ABBA and became the forerunner to today’s DVD and latest-generation optical formats such as Blu-ray and HD DVD.

Audio Compact Discs were introduced formally to the world in November 1982 in Japan with US and European markets getting their first glimpse in March the following year.

It marked the beginning of the end for analog recording and opened up the world of digital audio.

Philips tells the story of the first prototype being demonstrated to the Philips board in the northern autumn of 1978 consisting of a cubic metre of electronics hidden behind a black cloth.

Initial attempts to produced a digital recording from an analog source started with delta-sigma modulation to capture the change in audio signal rather than the absolute value of it. It failed spectacularly, forcing Philips engineers to come up with a more complex but ultimately successful system called Pulse Code Modulation, where audio signal voltage levels were coded into digital form.

Work on the compact disc began in 1979 as Philips and Sony formed a joint development team to bring the compact disc into reality. The story goes that the original disc capacity was intended to be 60minutes but that was extended to 74minutes to allow Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony to fit on a single CD. By June 1980, the “red book” standard that would govern the audio CD’s specifications was born.

The red book standard confirmed PCM as the digital audio format of choice and is still used today in DVD-Audio as well as the latest Blu-ray and HD DVD discs.

The original 1983 release of compact disc features 150 titles but it wasn’t until 80s megaband Dire Straits produced one of the first all-digital CD recordings for its album “Brothers in Arms” that compact disc finally took. The 1985 Dire Straits album was the first compact disc to sell in excess of one million discs.

“The Compact Disc has proven its significance in bringing the highest quality of music to consumers who wish to enjoy scratch free music. The enormous success of the CD over the last twenty-five years has opened many new opportunities for consumers to make the most of their music at home and on the move,” said Lucas Covers, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Philips Consumer Electronics. “It has played a pivotal role in the shift from analogue music to digital, not least for the DVD as well in music, though moreover in helping lay the foundation for even new technologies such as Blu-ray quality today,” he added.

Since that time, Philips estimates that over 200 billion CDs have been produced worldwide and even though each disc is only 1.2mm thick, stacked on top of each other, they would circle the globe six times.

Philips doesn’t attribute the invention of the CD to any one person.

"We needed all the skills that you would find in a large lab," says Piet Kramer, who at the time was head of the optical group that made a significant contribution to the CD technology. "Electronics engineers, photographic experts, mechanical engineers, control engineers, you have to bring all of these experts together, and then look to see if it can be done."