The Compact Disk or CD

It was on August 7,1982, that the world's first music CD rolled off the assembly line in a factory near Hannover in Germany, owned by Philips, the Dutch company that co-developed the new recording technology with Japan-based Sony.

The technology of the music CD was soon modified to create the CD-ROM (for read only memory) which quickly became the de facto recording and portable storage medium for the personal computer.

Interestingly, the world's second largest maker of optical storage devices such as CDs and DVDs is an Indian undertaking — Moser Baer — which rolls out over 3.2 billion disks a year from its plant in Noida near Delhi.

The company has already moved to the next era of the high density DVD which kicks up the storage capacity of each platter to over 25 gigabytes. It is operating internationally certified production processes for both competing high density DVD standards — HD DVD and Blu ray.