The first CD was manufactured 25 years ago today and is still popular as a music and storage format, despite competition from digital downloads and the DVD.

On 17 August 1982 the first Compact Discs were produced in a factory in Germany by Philips.

The early music CDs were mainly aimed at classical music fans who were thought able to afford the expensive discs and CD-players.

Eventually the CD became the standard music format for singles and albums, able to hold up to 74 minutes of music.

Later the CD also became the standard format for computer software and data storage, capable of storing 650-700 MB of data, much more than the previous floppy disk format.

Re-writable CDs allowed users not only to store large amounts of data on one disc, but also to write or 'burn' data to the same disc many times.

Eventually almost all PC systems would have at least one or two CD drives, and the ability to burn data to disc.

However, in the last 10 years CD sales have dropped partly due to the rise of digital music downloads such as those offered by iTunes.

And as computer users began to require much larger storage space for data such as movies and games, the CD has had to give way to portable hard drives, online storage, and the DVD (Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc).

However the CD remains many music lovers' format of choice, offering better sound quality than MP3 downloads, and is still a useful storage option for certain amounts of computer data.

Related Tip: Write CDs and DVDs