The album was by ABBA, but it wasn't the one containing the single Mamma Mia!, the one that most of all made the Swedish band famous between the 70s and 80s. The first commercially made compact disc in history, or rather CD, was sold 37 years ago, exactly on August 17, 1982, and played ABBA's eighth (and last) album The Visitors, released in the fall of the previous year.
Before one of the most successful pop albums of that period was released, the first commercial CD in history it was physically produced in Germany, by Philips. Certainly a historic novelty, given the large-scale diffusion that CDs have had from that moment on all over the world, even if over time they have been supplanted by their evolution, DVDs, and by the advent of digital and streaming music.
However, compact discs in turn led to the disappearance of the legendary cassette players and cassette tapes, which had depopulated up to those years and which still remain in the collective imagination as unforgettable vintage objects. Only 4 years after that August 17, 1982, there were already 9 million CD players in the world. In 1991, CD sales exceeded one billion units, surpassing that of traditional LPs. In 2000 the peak: 3,5 billion units were sold, i.e. one compact disc for every two inhabitants of our planet.
The project, which saw the birth of the compact disc in its definitive configuration, is due to a joint venture made up of the Dutch multinational Philips and the Japanese Sony. These two companies decided to buy T. Russel's patent, an American inventor who already in the seventies had perfected the system for transferring binary information within an optical memory on disk.
After various preliminary studies, the two multinationals realized that the CD would allow the creation of a disc with a data storage capacity greater than 600 megabytes and over an hour of music in digital format. However, there were many concerns about it, including the following: PC memories at the time ranged from 64KB up to 4MB; laser cd players were very expensive for people, hardly replacing the good old cassette players.
These doubts were eliminated, thanks to the extraordinary technological progress of those early eighties: CDs, as we all know, became a mass cult product, to the point of becoming obsolete and obsolete today.
