History of Optical Storage
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Historically, two industries have been the main driving forces behind the huge advancements in optical storage technology. These are the IT (information technology) industry and the entertainment industry. In the IT camp one can find high-tech giants such as Dell, Apple, Sony, Philips, Toshiba, and NEC; on the other hand, big movie players such as 20th Century Fox, MGM, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers are the forces in the entertainment industry.
According to Wikipedia, a fellow by the name of David Paul Gregg developed an analog optical disk for recording video and had it patented in 1961 and 1969. The patent was acquired by the Music Corporation of America (MCA) when the entity acquired Gregg's company, Gauss Electrophysics.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the physicists of the Netherlands-based Philips corporation began their first optical disk experiments in 1969. Six years later, Philips and MCA joined forces in creating the laserdisc, which was first introduced in the United States in 1978. Philips issued the laserdisc players, while MCA churned out the discs themselves. However, the laserdisc, while a technological pioneer, turned out to be a commercial failure. Also, its plight wasn't helped by the strong presence of the VHS format, which has survived up to the early years of this millennium.
In 1980, Philips found itself partnered with Sony as the two companies developed the Compact Disc (CD), a digital audio medium meant to supplant music vinyl records. Four years later, the Yellow Book came out, defining a new standard for the CD’s evolution into a CD-ROM (CD Read Only Memory). These CD-ROMs weren't limited to audio data, as they can also hold software, text, and video.
After the Yellow Book came the Green Book, which added graphics to the CD-ROM, as well as the all-important ability to interleave audio, video, and data (in essence, multimedia). Next came the standardized file system for CD-ROMs, called High Sierra, which allowed the optical disks to be read by computers running Windows/MS-DOS, Apple, or Unix.
As if the Yellow and Green Books weren't enough, the Orange Book came trudging along, bringing with it the technical details for the CD-R (CD Recordable). This technological advancement gave people a less expensive means of storing data in CDs, as well as unfortunately giving software, music, and movie pirates the power to make illegal copies of CDs.
In the first article, we mentioned that optical storage media can also grouped by generation. First-generation optical disks were initially used to store music and software. Examples of these are laserdiscs, CDs, and magneto-optical discs. Second-generation optical disks came to use in the 1990s and are able to store large amounts of data (which is needed in good-quality digital video). Examples of these are DVDs, minidisks, phase-change disks, fluorescent multilayer discs, and universal media discs. Lastly, most third-generation optical disks are not yet in the market, but are looking to be the prime players in the near future. Vastly superior in data capacity, these disks will be able to store high-definition (HD) video and massive video games. Examples of these are HD DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, versatile multilayer discs, and holographic versatile discs.
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