Release of Compact Discs

Date: March 2, 1983 • Location: Tokyo, Japan

Compact discs and players are released for the first time in the United States and other markets. They had previously been available only in Japan.

The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and is capable of holding uncompressed stereo audio. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc format to reach the market, following the larger LaserDisc (LD). In later years, the technology was adapted for computer data storage as CD-ROM and subsequently expanded into various writable and multimedia formats. By 2007, over 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.