Optical Disc - History

History

The optical disc was invented in 1958. In 1961 and 1969, David Paul Gregg registered a patent for the analog optical disc for video recording. This form of optical disc was a very early form of the DVD U.S. Patent 3,430,966. It is of special interest that U.S. Patent 4,893,297, filed 1989, issued 1990, generated royalty income for Pioneer Corporation's DVA until 2007 —then encompassing the CD, DVD, and Blu-ray systems. In the early 1960s, the Music Corporation of America bought Gregg's patents and his company, Gauss Electrophysics.

Later, in the Netherlands in 1969, Philips Research physicists began their first optical videodisc experiments at Eindhoven. In 1975, Philips and MCA began to work together, and in 1978, commercially much too late, they presented their long-awaited Laserdisc in Atlanta. MCA delivered the discs and Philips the players. However, the presentation was a technical and commercial failure and the Philips/MCA cooperation ended.

In Japan and the U.S., Pioneer succeeded with the videodisc until the advent of the DVD. In 1979, Philips and Sony, in consortium, successfully developed the audio compact disc.

In the mid-1990s, a consortium of manufacturers developed the second generation of the optical disc, the DVD.

Magnetic disks found limited applications in storing the data in large amount. So,there was the need of finding some more data storing techniques. As a result, it was found that by using optical means large data storing devices can be made which in turn gave rise to the optical discs.The very first application of this kind was the Compact Disc(CD) which was used in audio systems.

Sony and Philips developed the first generation of the CDs in the mid 1980s with the complete specifications for these devices.With the help of this kind of technology the possibility of representing the analog signal into digital signal was exploited to great level.For this purpose the 16 bit samples of the analog signal were taken at the rate of 44,100 samples per second which was obviously following the Nyquist Criteria.The design of first version of the CD's was to hold up to 75 minutes of music which was requiring 3GB of storage.

The third generation optical disc was developed in 2000–2006, and was introduced as Blu-ray Disc. First movies on Blu-ray Discs were released in June 2006. Blu-ray eventually prevailed in a high definition optical disc format war over a competing format, the HD DVD. A standard Blu-ray disc can hold about 25 GB of data, a DVD about 4.7 GB, and a CD about 700 MB.