The First CD Goes on Sale

Indestructible! Until You Destroy Them

Vinyl purists got very annoyed while tech nerds became equally excited on this day in 1982 (in Japan initially, but soon globally) as a small Mom & Pop organisation called Sony launched the world’s first commercial compact disc player and blew all of our tiny minds. The CDP-101 cost audiophiles 168,000 yen on release (or around $730) and featured a remote control described by one reviewer as ‘cute’.As both Tomorrow’s World and Blue Peter ably demonstrated, the new discs that could be used with this player were completely indestructible, unlike those pesky old record albums that could be bent, scratched and used as frisbees during moments of acute boredom. Though, as we all found to our cost, you couldn’t really smear peanut butter on the surface of a CD or go at it with an ice pick and expect pure, stereophonic sound. The first commercially available CD released alongside the new player in Japan on October 1st appears to be Billy Joel‘s opus ‘52nd Street’. And yet it still took off. Amazing.