Overview

Did you know that until the late 1800s the ability to record audio (voice or music) was just a dream? In 1877 "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was recorded and played on Thomas Edison's first experimental talking machine called a phonograph. About one hundred years (1982) after Edison's introduction of the phonograph, two companies, Sony and Philips, marketed the first digital audio 5-inch compact disc (CD). A CD-ROM (Compact Disc Read-Only Memory) disc is basically the same as a CD audio disc, except for the way the data is stored on the disc. A CD-ROM allows multimedia data (audio, text, computer graphics, and video images) to be stored on the same disc for use in a personal computer. For example, a CD-ROM can contain the complete text of the dictionary, 24 volumes of an encyclopedia, a thesaurus, a world almanac, an atlas...