Another birthday for the CD has come and gone and yet the damn things just won’t die. On Aug. 17th, 1982, the Compact Disc was born into an age of rampant consumerism that was the 1980s. Big hair was in, big vinyl and the big snarls of tape from cassettes was out.

The CD of course wasn’t without its drawbacks. They disliked abuse and absolutely had to live in their cases. I replaced the bulk of my CDs with my first car player before going back to cassette so I could dub my own playlists and stop spending money on music I had already bought.  Even the players then were delicate. My car CD player touted a 3 second anti-skip buffer for those canyons in the road called potholes. Of course back in east Texas they had washboard roads that could eat up that buffer and just ruin AC/DC’s Who Made Who.

It would be well over a decade later before semi affordable CD-Rs would arrive. Since then everything from music, to photos, to video, to Grandma’s recipes have been stored on CD.

Some really great things came on CD like, Windows 98, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and Starsiege: Tribes. I invested a big chunk of my life in Tribes.

Of course the CD is also responsible for bringing us some really bad things too. Remember Windows Millennium Edition? They should have melted down those CDs before they left the factory. Then there was Mary Schneider’s Yodeling the Classics. That thing should be classified as a method of torture.

Remember when AOL used to spew out those CDs to pimp their dialup service? I use to use them as coasters for my coffee cup. When a new one came into the office, (about every few days it seemed) I’d toss my old AOL coaster and put down the new one.

What do you think some of the best and worse things that have ever been put to CD are?

(Image Credit:flickr.com rodrigo senna)

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windows, consumer electronics, Compact Disc, CD

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