It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turned 25 years old on Friday -- and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
I didn't get my first CD until 1990 and I won’t be getting rid of them anytime soon. I still have my record collection and most of my cassettes boxed up somewhere for that matter. I just don’t trust computer hard drives for storing all of my music. I had a hard drive crash on me a couple of years ago and we lost a lot of digital pictures that weren’t backed up.
But it is probably only a matter of time before everything is stored on multiple hard drives and CDs will be cast aside like all those old floppy disc drives.
Speaking of anniversaries, my 18th wedding anniversary is this weekend as is my son's 4th birthday and two weeks later we will be going to College Station for my 20th college reunion.
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