Let’s hitch a ride up the 1990s traffic pecking order. In third place comes the vintage couple in their Sunday ride. What fuels them is the belief that the faster they drive, the slower time goes – wanting to fast- forward their day to fluffy-slipper-and-TV time, they hog the fast lane at four kilometres an hour.
Next is the taxi driver, right arm dangling outside the window, either as a fashion statement, or because it’s weighed down by the utter bulk of his ċurkett tal-lira.
In first place is the boy racer, revving like there’s no tomorrow (which, if he insists on driving like that, there definitely won’t be), with a compact disc dangling from the rear-view mirror, blinding anyone coming from the opposite direction.
It’s the 1990s and the compact disc is the height of modernity, fashion and technology. The impact of this new format brought a massive shake-up – the quality of the music was now crisper, the format more suitable for an on-the-go generation, and the archaic rewind and fast-forward functions of the cassette tape a thing of the past.
Moreover, it would soon be adopted as a main storage device for computers, heralding yet another revolution.
Philips and Sony jointly produced the first music compact disc almost three decades ago.
The two companies had started experimenting with the format in 1979, with the aim of developing a disc which would hold an hour of audio.
However, this capacity had to be extended to 74 minutes to accommodate a complete performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.
The first CD that was produced was ABBA’s The Visitors in 1982. Ironically, it was also the Swedish pop group’s final studio album – of course, their breakup had nothing to do with the new CD format. The Dire Straits’ album Brothers in Arms further popularised the format.
Billions of sales later, CD sales are on the wane, in favour of digital downloads for music, and memory sticks, FTP services and the cloud for data. Yet for some, it is still the format of choice – although those with a CD still hanging from their rear-view mirror need to fast-forward to more modern times.