Happy Birthday! CD turns 25.

Twenty-five years (17 August 1982) ago the first compact discs rolled of the production presses at the Philips factory near Hannover in Germany. Since then more than 200 billion CDs have been sold worldwide after pushing out vinyl records and then cassettes as the format of choice for listening to music. Those early CDs also paved the way for other digital discs, like the DVD and CD-Rom, which became ubiquitous in the computer and and movie industries. "In the late seventies and early eighties we never imagined that one day, the computing and entertainment industries would also opt for the digital CD to store the growing volume of data for computer programs and movies," said Piet Kramer, one of the Philips engineers who developed the CD. Those first CDs contained Strauss' Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland's Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Inc of Japan. But their future looks increasingly under threat from iPoda and MP3 players that play music downloaded directly from the internet or digital storage devices for computer files.