What is CD/DVD?

Remember the days when you had to carefully extract a shiny disc from its casing and insert into your DVD player to listen to music or watch a movie? CDs and DVDs revolutionised the way we stored and accessed digital content, and still holds a special place for all of us. 

What do CD and DVD stand for?

‘CD’ stands for Compact Disc whereas ‘DVD’ stands for Digital Versatile Disc. They are optical storage media used to store digital data. The CD was developed by Philips and Sony in the early 1980s, while the DVD was later developed in the late 1990s by a group of companies, including Toshiba, Sony, Philips, and Panasonic.  

How do they work?

Both CDs and DVDs use laser technology to read data stored on them. The data is stored on a disc as a series of microscopic indentations, which the laser reads as binary code. The laser reads the bumps and valleys on the disc’s surface and converts them into binary code. This is the primary reason why data stored on discs is extremely susceptible to external damage. 

When introduced, CDs were capable of storing 700MB of data. DVDs, on the other hand, launched with support for 4.7GB of storage.  

CDs and DVDs were widely used for storing music, software, movies, and various other kinds of digital content. Although digital media such as cloud storage and streaming have largely replaced them, they are still used as a backup option in case of data loss or damage to digital storage devices.