page_title: Optical disc
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Optical disc / History
caption_attribution_description: Ausschnitt aus einer Versuchsscheibe für die Lichttonorgel. Clipping of a test-disc for the phototone-organ. Eigene Aufnahme.
context_page_description: In computing and optical disc recording technologies, an optical disc is a flat, usually circular disc that encodes binary data in the form of pits and lands on a special material on one of its flat surfaces.
context_section_description: The first recorded historical use of an optical disc was in 1884 when Alexander Graham Bell, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter recorded sound on a glass disc using a beam of light.
  Optophonie is a very early (1931) example of a recording device using light for both recording and playing back sound signals on a transparent photograph. 
  An early optical disc system existed in 1935, named Lichttonorgel.
  An early analog optical disc used for video recording was invented by David Paul Gregg in 1958 and patented in the US in 1961 and 1969. This form of optical disc was a very early form of the DVD  (U.S. Patent 3,430,966). It is of special interest that U.S. Patent 4,893,297, filed 1989, issued 1990, generated royalty income for Pioneer Corporation's DVA until 2007 —then encompassing the CD, DVD, and Blu-ray systems. In the early 1960s, the Music Corporation of America bought Gregg's patents and his company, Gauss Electrophysics.
  American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record a digital signal on an optical transparent foil that is lit from behind by a high-power halogen lamp. Russell's patent application was first filed in 1966 and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's patents (then held by a Canadian company, Optical Recording Corp.) in the 1980s.
  Both Gregg's and Russell's disc are floppy media read in transparent mode, which imposes serious drawbacks. In the Netherlands in 1969, Philips Research physicist, Pieter Kramer invented an optical videodisc in reflective mode with a protective layer read by a focused laser beam U.S. Patent 5,068,846, filed 1972, issued 1991. Kramer's physical format is used in all optical discs. In 1975, Philips and MCA began to work together, and in 1978, commercially much too late, they presented their long-awaited Laserdisc in Atlanta. MCA delivered the discs and Philips the players. However, the presentation was a commercial failure, and the cooperation ended.
  In Japan and the U.S., Pioneer succeeded with the Laserdisc until the advent of the DVD. In 1979, Philips and Sony, in consortium, successfully developed the audio compact disc.
  In 1979, Exxon STAR Systems in Pasadena, CA built a computer controlled WORM drive that utilized thin film coatings of Tellurium and Selenium on a 12" diameter glass disk. The recording system utilized blue light at 457nm to record and red light at 632.8nm to read. STAR Systems was bought by Storage Technology Corporation (STC) in 1981 and moved to Boulder, CO.  Development of the WORM technology was continued using 14" diameter aluminum substrates. Beta testing of the disk drives, originally labeled the Laser Storage Drive 2000 (LSD-2000), was only moderately successful. Many of the disks were shipped to RCA Laboratories (now David Sarnoff Research Center) to be used in the Library of Congress archiving efforts. The STC disks utilized a sealed cartridge with an optical window for protection U.S. Patent 4,542,495.
  The CD-ROM format was developed by Sony and Philips, introduced in 1984, as an extension of Compact Disc Digital Audio and adapted to hold any form of digital data. The same year, Sony demonstrated a LaserDisc data storage format, with a larger data capacity of 3.28 GB.
  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Optex, Inc. of Rockville, MD, built an erasable optical digital video disc system U.S. Patent 5,113,387 using Electron Trapping Optical Media (ETOM)U.S. Patent 5,128,849. Although this technology was written up in Video Pro Magazine's December 1994 issue promising "the death of the tape", it was never marketed.
  In the mid-1990s, a consortium of manufacturers (Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Panasonic) developed the second generation of the optical disc, the DVD.
  Magnetic disks found limited applications in storing the data in large amount. So, there was the need of finding some more data storing techniques. As a result, it was found that by using optical means large data storing devices can be made that in turn gave rise to the optical discs. The very fi
caption: An earlier analog optical disc recorded in 1935 for Lichttonorgel (sampling organ)
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