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Heather Purpera

CD History - 0 views

www.mh-audio.nl/tips%5Ccdhistory.htm

inventor history notes google picture

shared by Heather Purpera on 16 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • It was Philips Industries, a Dutch-based electronics giant (known in the music world as owner of the PolyGram labels), that made the first announcement, on May 17, 1978. Working with Japan's Sony Corporation, Philips announced that they would have a marketable compact disc and appropriate hardware ready "in the early 1980s." That promise was kept on October 1, 1982, when the compact disc was introduced in Japan by CBS/Sony, with 112 different CD titles and a CD player (Sony's CDP-101). The last few months of 1982 were hectic, with Sony selling over 20,000 CD players and Hitachi also posting sales in the 6,000 per month range for their player. Prices for these initial players ran from about $700 to about $1000. The discs themselves, priced at about $15-20, could not be pressed fast enough to meet demand. Sony's research on who was buying the discs in Japan indicated it was young (20s, early 30s) men with a particular interest in sound quality. Perhaps it was this research that led others to believe, as the rest of the world looked on in curiosity to what was happening in Japan, that CDs would fill a niche for high quality sound enthusiasts and little else. By the end of 1982, CBS/Sony and Epic/Sony had issued 122 CD titles.
  • The stories about compact discs published in Billboard during early 1983 are fascinating. The lead story on January 29 has PolyGram mulling over how to package the CD in the US when it's released later in 1983, leaning toward the (in retrospect, ill-fated) "long box," the 6"x12" cardboard box which they convinced the industry to adopt at the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) meeting the next week. (Many at the meeting were considering a 12"x12" box!)
  • In February, Sony announced a "firm" suggested retail price of $1000 for their CD player and $16.98 for discs when they would be introduced later that year in the US. February 23, 1983 marked the debut of the compact disc in Europe, with PolyGram's Hans Gout noting that, "The sooner the Compact Disc replaces the conventional black vinyl LP, the better." By early March, Sony and CBS Records in the US were supplying free compact disc players and discs to selected radio stations here, mostly with Classical and Album-Oriented Rock formats. The March 12 issue of Billboard also notes that Capitol Record Shop, a Hartford, Connecticut, record store, had begun importing CDs from Japan and Europe, with 24 titles at a price tag of $24.95 each. At the time the owner was interviewed, he had only sold a total of one disc.
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  • Several months of delays and anticipation dragged by, until in late June, 1983, CBS finally shipped the first CD "prepacks" to a select 35 accounts. Each prepack had a total of 12 titles, with no more than a total of 1000 prepacks altogether in the first shipment. Among the individual titles were Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, Billy Joel's The Stranger, Michael Jackson's Thriller, and Toto's Toto IV. Other titles were jazz and classical. The CD era had begun in the United States.
  • Within about a month, CBS had issued several other pop/rock titles, including Boston's Don't Look Back, Earth Wind & Fire's Raise!, ELO's Discovery, Journey's Escape, Boz Scaggs' Silk Degrees, Barbra Streisand's Guilty, and Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run. These had the CBS logo (and mastering numbers in the DIDP 50000 series). Later, these were reissued with Columbia logos, but these remain as examples of the earliest American CD releases
  • After the introduction of the CD here, most of the stories in the trade press center around the acute shortage of pressing plants. At that time, there were two major plants, PolyGram's Hanover, West Germany plant, and Sony's plant in Japan. (Almost all the CDs sold under US labels for the first few years were either made in Japan or West Germany.) Sales figures for the US in 1983 totalled about 30,000 players and 800,000 discs. Still, no one really knew if the CD would succeed.
Katie Gatliff

Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them - Tim Walsh - Google Books - 0 views

books.google.com/books

toys classic created tim google books books inventor history notes picture google cell phone game milton MartinCooper cooper

shared by Katie Gatliff on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Katie Gatliff on 17 Jan 14
     
    This is another Google book about hime  
Nathanael Nix

MARTIN COOPER - 0 views

www.martincooper.uk.com/...biog.html

cell phone history inventor martin cooper MartinCooper cellphone-facts

shared by Nathanael Nix on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Martin Cooper was born in Liverpool in 1958 and studied art at the Laird School of Art in Birkenhead.
  • Between 1980 and 1989 Martin was a member of the highly successful pop group Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
  • Martin has exhibited extensively, both in the UK and overseas, and his pictures hang in many private collections. In recent years he has exhibited at the Williamson Art Gallery (Birkenhead), the Royal Academy of Arts (London), the David Messum Fine Art Gallery (London), W H Patterson (London), Woodhay Picture Gallery (Newbury), Llewellyn Alexander (London), the Brian Sinfield Gallery (Compton Cassey Galleries), Sarah Samuals Fine Art (Chester), Heritage House (Bermuda) and the Fel Gallery (Singapore).
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  • In 1998 Martin was awarded the sponsors prize in the Discerning Eye exhibition which was held at The Mall Gallery in London.
  • Martin lives in Greasby, Merseyside with his wife, Alexandra Bibby, a classical pianist, and their two sons.
  • Nathanael Nix on 14 Jan 14
     
    This is a very good informational website about one of Martin Cooper's previous jobs.
Tuffer Jordan

Wecome to NWS&T Magazine Online - 0 views

depts.washington.edu/...index.php

CD inventor

shared by Tuffer Jordan on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The Puget Sound Engineering Council selected Russell as the 2005 Industry Engineer of the Year. And despite all of his accomplishments, it wasn't until Joe Decuir of Seattle's chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., (IEEE) saw a story about Russell in the local newspaper that he suggested Russell's name to the committee last fall.
  • In the mid 1950s, he was frustrated with the sound quality of LPs, which started wearing out after only a dozen plays. He even tried using a cactus needle to play records because the jewel needle wore out the vinyl faster and didn't sound as clear. Russell wanted a way to capture the complexity and nuances of classical music without damaging the recording. And the idea that sparked a multi-billion dollar industry was about to take shape in Russell's mind.
  • In fifth grade, he started building radios out of parts he scrounged from the neighbors. In high school, he took a job setting up a commercial radio station, even though he didn't know how to hook up most of the equipment. "But I learned– rapidly,” he laughs.
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  • After graduating from Reed College with a degree in physics in 1953, Russell took a job with General Electric in the Hanford Nuclear Plant doing experimental work.
  • Battelle took over the Hanford Laboratories in 1965 and gave Russell a lab and time to work on some of his imaginings, including the crazy idea that sound could be converted to strings of numbers and reproduced using light.
  • He had come up with a way of using a laser to read digital bits of information, which later became the most widely-used way to read just about everything. By using a light to read the data, the record would never wear out. The data are encoded as microscopic pit marks on the surface of the disk, which, when spun, can be read to reproduce high-quality sound.
  • The original goal was to record television shows, not music, because adding visuals would be more difficult. If television couldn't be recorded digitally, Russell and his backers decided they would at least know where they stood. In 1973, they were successful, but they were ahead of their time. Amazingly, no one wanted to buy a license for the precursor to the DVD.
  • By 1991, about 25 years after he came up with the idea, CDs were outselling their predecessors, audio tapes, in record stores nationwide.
  • But all he can do is shrug ruefully, "I didn't invent the CD, I invented the technology.”
  • Today, Russell has more than 50 patents to his name. He continues his work from the basement of his Bellevue home where he and Barbara have lived for more than a decade.
  • The first devices were called Optical Digital Data Storage –the term CD is actually a trademark of Philips. The original storage units were made of glass plates, about the size of large index cards, which could be read as a laser scanned over them.
    • Tuffer Jordan
      Tuffer Jordan on 16 Jan 14
       
      Russell didn't get fame nor riches for his invention.
  • Now, sales of the mirror-like plastic discs are in the billions every year, but the man behind it all has gotten neither fame nor riches. The company that held the patents sold the rights for a song. Now, Russell has a few artifacts from the early days, a scrapbook full of pictures, and a handful of plaques and trophies to show for all his
    • Tuffer Jordan
      Tuffer Jordan on 16 Jan 14
       
      In the fifth grade, Russell started building radios out of parts he scrounged form the neighbors.
    • Tuffer Jordan
      Tuffer Jordan on 16 Jan 14
       
      Russell came up with a way of using a laser to read digital bits of information, which later became the most widely-used way to read just about everything.
  • Tuffer Jordan on 10 Jan 14
     
    James T. Russell invented the CD! 
Heather Purpera

History of Computers and Computing, Birth of the modern computer, The bases of digital ... - 0 views

history-computer.com/...compact_disc.html

history james compact disk modern

shared by Heather Purpera on 10 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Compact Disk of James Russel The first workable digital compact disc device, the precursor on now ubiquitous CD/DVDs, was invented in the late 1960s by the American physicist James Russell
  • James T. Russell was born in Bremerton, Washington in 1931. He was always a smart boy and at the age of six he devised a remote-control battleship with a storage compartment for his lunch (obviously the young James enjoyed the food :-)
  • In 1953, Russell earned his Bachelor degree in physics and graduated from Reed College in Portland. Afterwards he went to work as a Physicist in General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, where his wife Barbara worked as a chemist. At GE, working for the Hanford Nuclear Plant, and appointed as a "designated problem-solver" for GE experimental unit, Russell initiated many experimental instrumentation projects. He was among the first to use a color TV screen and keyboard as the main interface between computer and operator. He also designed and built the first electron beam welder. In 1950s and early 1960s, Russell, who was an avid music listener (he was found of classical music—Beethoven, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Offenbach. etc.), quite frustrated with the wear and tear of his vinyl records and their poor sound quality, tried to improve the record player. Initially he tried using a cactus needle, instead of steel one, for a stylus, but with no success. "After each record you had to resharpen the needle," he recalled.
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  • In 1965, the Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute opened its Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, to took over management of Hanford's lab, and James Russell joined the effort as Senior Scientist. Thus he gained an audience for his more far-fetched ideas and immediately began to pepper Battelle with proposals for new commercial concepts. The optical digital technology was initially met with skepticism, as it was not believed that one could digitize sound. "Here I was at Battelle, enmeshed in the scientific community, and one of the first things I had to demonstrate was that you could digitize music and reproduce it" he said. "Music into numbers? Come on now, Russell."
  • ple to convert into an audible or visible transmission.
  • Through the 1970s, Russell continued to refine the CD-ROM, adapting it to any form of data. However, like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first. In 1971, Eli S. Jacobs, a New York venture capitalist, pioneered the commercialization by forming Digital Recording Corporation to further enhance the product for the consumer video market, and hired Russell and a team of technicians to come up with a video disk. Their efforts led to a 20-minute video disc in 1973.
  • "The vision I had in mind was of television programs on little plastic records. The networks, instead of putting programs on television, would print records. And if you wanted to watch your favorite programs you'd get them in the mail and put in the disk whenever you want," Russell said. "Jacobs thought, if we can do it, hey great, we've got the whole world by the tail. And if we can't, well at least you know where you are." In 1974 Digital Recording Corporation announced an optical digital television recording and playback machine, the first device to digitize a color image, at a Chicago trade show. The response from large potential investors was rather cool. Philips Electronics representatives visited Russell's Battelle lab in the summer of 1975, and they discounted the entire premise of his work. "They said: It's all very well for data storage, but you can't do that for video or audio." recalled Russell. Philips had just released its laser disc, an analog optical video player, and they were convinced that analog was the only way. "Philips put $60 million into development of the laser disc. We were advised that nobody would tell them they had made a mistake."
  • Sony launched its CDP-101—the first commercialized CD player in 1982. Sony and Philips paid royalties from CD player sales to Battelle and to Optical Recording Corporation. Time-Warner and other disc manufacturers settled with the Optical Recording Corporation in 1992, paying $30 million for patent infringement. The court determined that Optical Recording had the sole rights over the technology mentioned in the patents. But because the patents properly belonged to Russell's employer, he never got a cent out of either deal. By 1985, Russell had earned 26 patents for CD-ROM technology. He then founded his own consulting firm, where he has continued to create and patent improvements in optical storage systems, along with bar code scanners, liquid crystal shutters, and other industrial optical instruments. His most revolutionary recent invention is a high-speed optical data recorder and player that has no moving parts. Russell earned another 11 patents for this "Optical Random Access Memory" device.
  • James Russell has more good ideas before breakfast than most people do all their life
  • Heather Purpera on 10 Jan 14
     
    Information and facts on the inventor 
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