The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then released in October 1982 in Japan and branded as Digital Audio Compact Disc.
The Compact Disc-Interactive is a digital optical disc data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of CDDA and CD-ROM and specified in the Green Book specifications, co-developed by Philips and Sony, to combine audio, text and graphics. The two companies initially expected to impact the education/training, point of sale, and home entertainment industries, but CD-i eventually became best known for its video games.
The PowerBook is a family of Macintosh laptop computers designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer from 1991 to 2006. During its lifetime, the PowerBook went through several major revisions and redesigns, often being the first to incorporate features that would later become standard in competing laptops. The PowerBook line was targeted at the professional market. In 1999, the line was supplemented by the home and education-focused iBook family.
Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), is a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman started out as a portable cassette player and the brand was later extended to serve most of Sony's portable audio devices; since 2011 it consists exclusively of digital flash memory players. The current flagship product as of 2022 is the WM1ZM2 player.
Compact Disc Digital Audio, also known as Digital Audio Compact Disc or simply as Audio CD, is the standard format for audio compact discs. The standard is defined in the Red Book, one of a series of Rainbow Books that contain the technical specifications for all CD formats.
MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.
A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to watch the DVD content, which could be a movie, a recorded TV show, or other content.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
VAIO is a brand of personal computers and consumer electronics, currently developed by Japanese manufacturer VAIO Corporation, headquartered in Azumino, Nagano Prefecture.
In computing, an optical disc drive is a disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some drives can only read from certain discs, but recent drives can both read and record, also called burners or writers. Compact discs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs are common types of optical media which can be read and recorded by such drives.
The Macintosh TV is a personal computer with integrated television capabilities released by Apple Computer in 1993. It was Apple's first attempt at computer-television integration. It shares the external appearance of the Macintosh LC 500 series, but in black. The Macintosh TV is essentially a Performa 520 that can switch its built-in 14" Sony Trinitron CRT from being a computer display to a cable-ready television. It is incapable of showing television in a desktop window, although it can capture still frames to PICT files.
The iMac G3, originally released as the iMac, is a series of Macintosh personal computers Apple Computer sold from 1998 to 2003. The iMac was Apple's first major product release under its CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, who returned to the financially troubled company in 1996 after eleven years away. Jobs reorganized the company and simplified the product line. The iMac was designed as Apple's new consumer desktop product—an inexpensive, consumer-oriented computer that would easily connect to the Internet.
The Data Discman is an electronic book player introduced to the Western market in late 1991 or early 1992 by Sony Corporation. It was marketed in the United States to college students and international travelers, but had little success outside Japan. The Discman product name had originally been applied to Sony's range of portable CD players such as the Sony Discman D-50, first released in 1984.
A portable media player (PMP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored on a compact disc (CD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), Blu-ray Disc (BD), flash memory, microdrive, SD cards or hard drive; most earlier PMPs used physical media, but modern players mostly use flash memory. In contrast, analogue portable audio players play music from non-digital media that use analogue media, such as cassette tapes or vinyl records.
Discman was Sony's brand name for portable CD players. The first Discman, the Sony D-50 or D-5, was launched in 1984. The brand name changed to CD Walkman, initially for Japanese lineups launched between October 1997 and March 1998, and then entirely in 2000. Discman and CD Walkman players are no longer produced.
CD/DVD copy protection is a blanket term for various methods of copy protection for CDs and DVDs. Such methods include DRM, CD-checks, Dummy Files, illegal tables of contents, over-sizing or over-burning the CD, physical errors and bad sectors. Many protection schemes rely on breaking compliance with CD and DVD standards, leading to playback problems on some devices.
The Macintosh LC 500 series is a series of personal computers that were a part of Apple Computer's Macintosh LC family of Macintosh computers, designed as a successor to the compact Macintosh family of computers for the mid-1990s mainstream education-market. The all-in-one desktop case is similar to the then recently introduced Macintosh Color Classic, but the LC 500 series is considerably larger and heavier due to its larger screen and a bulging midsection to house the larger electronics, including a 14" CRT display, CD-ROM drive, and stereo speakers.
The PowerBook 100 is a portable subnotebook personal computer designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple Computer and introduced on October 21, 1991, at the COMDEX computer expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Priced at US$2,500 with external floppy drive, the PowerBook 100 was the low-end model of the first three simultaneously released PowerBooks. Its CPU and overall speed closely resembled those of its predecessor, the Macintosh Portable. It had a Motorola 68000 processor at 16 MHz, 2-8 megabytes (MB) of RAM, a 9-inch (23 cm) monochrome backlit liquid crystal display (LCD) with 640 × 400 pixel resolution, and the System 7.0.1 operating system. It did not have a built-in floppy disk drive and was noted for its unique compact design that placed a trackball pointing device in front of the keyboard for ease of use.
A CD-ROM is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data is only usable on a computer.
Apple Inc. has produced and sold numerous music and multimedia speakers, available for standalone purchase and bundled with Macintosh products.
