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'MP3' Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary

Posted by timothy on from the instant-nostalgia dept.

Sachin Garg writes "The Data Compression News Blog reports that on July 14th 2005, the name "MP3" celebrates its tenth anniversary. On this day back in 1995, the researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987, in 1992 it was considered far ahead of its times, then MP3 became the generally accepted acronym for the ISO standard IS 11172-3 "MPEG Audio Layer 3" and no other coding method so far (2005) could uncrown MP3 as the popular standard for digital music on the computer and on the Internet."

6 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Somewhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... a record executive weeps.

  2. 10th anniversary for mp3? by FerretFrottage · · Score: 4, Funny

    I thought based on its compression ratio this would just be the 1st anniversary for mp3. Granted some things in those 10 years are lost, but we can't remember everything can we?

    --
    "Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
  3. Re:Raise your hand... by FrostedWheat · · Score: 3, Funny

    Oh fantastic! I'd forgot about that one!

    I remember running it on my overclocked 486, half sample rate and mono to get it to play - and only just. It took up most of the CPU and to play the MP3 without skipping I'd have to pause it at the start and let it buffer up a bit.

    8.3 filenames, no ID3 or streaming. Good days ;-)

  4. The bad old days... by decipher_saint · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I was eighteen,
    I downloaded a very good CD,
    A very good CD that took the whole night to grab,
    We found it on IRC
    My handle was brian_mcgee
    We burned it at 2 times for free
    When I was eighteen...

    With apologies to Homer, 1995 seems so long ago now...

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
  5. Sure, sure, it's 10 years old.... by Chairboy · · Score: 3, Funny

    But this is Slashdot. All we want to know is if it supports OGG vorbis.

  6. Spoiled bastards... by MicroPat · · Score: 5, Funny

    About 7 years ago, I ripped all my CD's to MP3, amazed at how much precious HDD space I could save while accessing all my music via the same source! Now, here I am, in the hard disk gigacheap days, stuck with these lossy-format buggers while the new kids on the block rip to their slightly larger lossless formats. You lucky, spoiled bastards.