The History of the CD-ROM

Gammu writes "The inventor of the compact disc, the most popular medium in the world for playing back and storing music, is often disputed as one individual did not invent every part of the compact disc. The most attributed inventor is James Russell, who in 1965 was inspired with a revolutionary idea as he sketched on paper a more ideal music recording system to replace vinyl records; Russell envisioned a system which could record and replay sounds without any physical contact between parts."

Comments

Re:Now if we could only go back in time...

[AKAImBatman]

go back in time and give him the designs for the bluRay.

It wouldn't help anything. Today's optical discs are based on the continual refinement of manufacturing processes. You could go back in time and explain how to make a BluRay disc and player, but no one would be able to manufacture discs with tight enough tolerances or microchips of sufficient speed and power to play back the data stream. And that's leaving out the issue of finding an HDTV set to make full use of the format. (HDTV was invented in 1969, but wasn't commercially viable until the 90's.)

Most people don't think about it, but inventions are driven as much by infrastructure as they are by smart people. If you lack the necessary industrial base, having all the technical knowledge in the world won't help you. (Witness a lot of third-world countries. The knowledge for a lot of technology is available, but they can't manufacture it.) To close the gap you still need to build tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools, so on and so forth.