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Henry Cow Box

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116-547: Henry Cow Box is a seven- CD limited edition box set by English avant-rock group Henry Cow . It was released in December 2006 by Recommended Records and comprises the six original albums Henry Cow released between 1973 and 1979, including those recorded with Slapp Happy . A bonus 3" CD-single was given to advance subscribers of the box set which contains previously unreleased material taken from live performances in Europe by

232-489: A Red Book CD; thus, the mono source material is usually presented as two identical channels in a standard Red Book stereo track (i.e., mirrored mono ); an MP3 CD , can have audio file formats with mono sound. CD-Text is an extension of the Red Book specification for an audio CD that allows for the storage of additional text information (e.g., album name, song name, artist) on a standards-compliant audio CD. The information

348-437: A personal computer hard disk drive . Several other formats were further derived, both pre-pressed and blank user writable, including write-once audio and data storage ( CD-R ), rewritable media ( CD-RW ), Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD), Photo CD , Picture CD , Compact Disc-Interactive ( CD-i ), Enhanced Music CD , and Super Audio CD (SACD) which may have a CD-DA layer. The optophone , first presented in 1913,

464-469: A 150-minute playing time, 44,056 Hz sampling rate, 16-bit linear resolution, and cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding (CIRC) error correction code —specifications similar to those later settled upon for the standard compact disc format in 1980. Technical details of Sony's digital audio disc were presented during the 62nd AES Convention, held on 13–16 March 1979, in Brussels . Sony's AES technical paper

580-400: A 60-bit word without having to split a byte between one word and the next. If longer bytes were needed, 60 bits would, of course, no longer be ideal. With present applications, 1, 4, and 6 bits are the really important cases.     With 64-bit words, it would often be necessary to make some compromises, such as leaving 4 bits unused in a word when dealing with 6-bit bytes at

696-467: A 64-bit word length for Stretch. It also supports NSA 's requirement for 8-bit bytes. Werner's term "Byte" first popularized in this memo.     NB. This timeline erroneously specifies the birth date of the term "byte" as July 1956 , while Buchholz actually used the term as early as June 1956 .     [...] 60 is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. Hence bytes of length from 1 to 6 bits can be packed efficiently into

812-597: A CD. VCDs are playable in dedicated VCD players, most modern DVD-Video players, personal computers, and some video game consoles. The VCD standard was created in 1993 by Sony, Philips, Matsushita , and JVC and is referred to as the White Book standard. Overall picture quality is intended to be comparable to VHS video. Poorly compressed VCD video can sometimes be of lower quality than VHS video, but VCD exhibits block artifacts rather than analog noise and does not deteriorate further with each use. 352×240 (or SIF ) resolution

928-458: A birth certificate. But I am sure that "byte" is coming of age in 1977 with its 21st birthday.     Many have assumed that byte, meaning 8 bits, originated with the IBM System/360, which spread such bytes far and wide in the mid-1960s. The editor is correct in pointing out that the term goes back to the earlier Stretch computer (but incorrect in that Stretch was the first, not

1044-472: A convenience, because 1024 is approximately 1000 . This definition was popular in early decades of personal computing , with products like the Tandon 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch DD floppy format (holding 368 640 bytes) being advertised as "360 KB", following the 1024 -byte convention. It was not universal, however. The Shugart SA-400 5 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk held 109,375 bytes unformatted, and

1160-419: A diameter of 120 mm (4.7 in), and are designed to hold up to 74 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital audio or about 650   MiB ( 681,574,400  bytes) of data. Capacity is routinely extended to 80 minutes and 700  MiB ( 734,003,200  bytes), 90 minutes 800  MiB ( 838,860,800  bytes), or 99 minutes 870  MiB ( 912,261,120  bytes) by arranging data more closely on

1276-475: A diameter of 20 cm (7.9 in) and a sound quality superior to that of the vinyl record. However, due to the unsatisfactory performance of the analog format, two Philips research engineers recommended a digital format in March 1974. In 1977, Philips then established a laboratory with the mission of creating a digital audio disc. The diameter of Philips's prototype compact disc was set at 11.5 cm (4.5 in),

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1392-417: A disc played from beginning to end slows its rotation rate during playback. The program area is 86.05 cm and the length of the recordable spiral is 86.05 cm / 1.6 μm = 5.38 km. With a scanning speed of 1.2 m/s, the playing time is 74 minutes or 650 MiB of data on a CD-ROM. A disc with data packed slightly more densely is tolerated by most players (though some old ones fail). Using

1508-400: A former member of the task force, gives background information on the many technical decisions made, including the choice of the sampling frequency, playing time, and disc diameter. The task force consisted of around 6 persons, though according to Philips, the compact disc was "invented collectively by a large group of people working as a team". Early milestones in the launch and adoption of

1624-484: A full transmission unit usually additionally includes a start bit, 1 or 2 stop bits, and possibly a parity bit , and thus its size may vary from seven to twelve bits for five to eight bits of actual data. For synchronous communication the error checking usually uses bytes at the end of a frame .     Terms used here to describe the structure imposed by the machine design, in addition to bit , are listed below.      Byte denotes

1740-465: A graphics signal (typically, the CD+G player is hooked up to a television set or a computer monitor); these graphics are almost exclusively used to display lyrics on a television set for karaoke performers to sing along with. The CD+G format takes advantage of the channels R through W. These six bits store the graphics information. CD + Extended Graphics (CD+EG, also known as CD+XG) is an improved variant of

1856-475: A group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (i.e., different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term

1972-553: A joint task force of engineers to design a new digital audio disc. Led by engineers Kees Schouhamer Immink and Toshitada Doi , the research pushed forward laser and optical disc technology. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the task force produced the Red Book CD-DA standard. First published in 1980, the standard was formally adopted by the IEC as an international standard in 1987, with various amendments becoming part of

2088-453: A linear velocity of 1.2 m/s and a narrower track pitch of 1.5 μm increases the playing time to 80 minutes, and data capacity to 700 MiB. Even denser tracks are possible, with semi-standard 90 minute/800 MiB discs having 1.33 μm, and 99 minute/870 MiB having 1.26 μm, but compatibility suffers as density increases. A CD is read by focusing a 780 nm wavelength ( near infrared ) semiconductor laser through

2204-469: A malfunctioning CD writer . Error scanning can reliably predict data losses caused by media deterioration. Support of error scanning differs between vendors and models of optical disc drives , and extended error scanning (known as "advanced error scanning" in Nero DiscSpeed ) has only been available on Plextor and some BenQ optical drives so far, as of 2020. The digital data on a CD begins at

2320-606: A new digital audio disc. After a year of experimentation and discussion, the Red Book CD-DA standard was published in 1980. After their commercial release in 1982, compact discs and their players were extremely popular. Despite costing up to $ 1,000, over 400,000 CD players were sold in the United States between 1983 and 1984. By 1988, CD sales in the United States surpassed those of vinyl LPs, and, by 1992, CD sales surpassed those of prerecorded music-cassette tapes. The success of

2436-406: A number of bits, treated as a unit, and usually representing a character or a part of a character.     NOTES:     1 The number of bits in a byte is fixed for a given data processing system.     2 The number of bits in a byte is usually 8.      We received the following from W Buchholz, one of the individuals who

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2552-545: A unit of logarithmic power ratio named after Alexander Graham Bell , creating a conflict with the IEC specification. However, little danger of confusion exists, because the bel is a rarely used unit. It is used primarily in its decadic fraction, the decibel (dB), for signal strength and sound pressure level measurements, while a unit for one-tenth of a byte, the decibyte, and other fractions, are only used in derived units, such as transmission rates. The lowercase letter o for octet

2668-405: A unit which "contains an unspecified amount of information ... capable of holding at least 64 distinct values ... at most 100 distinct values. On a binary computer a byte must therefore be composed of six bits". He notes that "Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits...When we speak of bytes in connection with MIX we shall confine ourselves to

2784-460: A variation of this technique called pulse-density modulation (PDM), while Matsushita (now Panasonic ) chose pulse-width modulation (PWM), advertising it as MASH, which is an acronym derived from their patented Multi-stAge noiSe-sHaping PWM topology. The CD was primarily planned as the successor to the vinyl record for playing music, rather than as a data storage medium. However, CDs have grown to encompass other applications. In 1983, following

2900-451: A worm gear is used, a second shorter-throw linear motor, in the form of a coil and magnet, makes fine position adjustments to track eccentricities in the disk at high speed. Some CD drives (particularly those manufactured by Philips during the 1980s and early 1990s) use a swing arm similar to that seen on a gramophone. The pits and lands do not directly represent the 0s and 1s of binary data . Instead, non-return-to-zero, inverted encoding

3016-650: Is 1024 bytes = 1024 bytes, one mebibyte (1 MiB) is 1024 bytes = 1 048 576 bytes, and so on. In 1999, Donald Knuth suggested calling the kibibyte a "large kilobyte" ( KKB ). The IEC adopted the IUPAC proposal and published the standard in January 1999. The IEC prefixes are part of the International System of Quantities . The IEC further specified that the kilobyte should only be used to refer to 1000 bytes. Lawsuits arising from alleged consumer confusion over

3132-504: Is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit .)     A word consists of the number of data bits transmitted in parallel from or to memory in one memory cycle. Word size is thus defined as a structural property of the memory. (The term catena was coined for this purpose by the designers of the Bull GAMMA 60  [ fr ] computer.)      Block refers to

3248-407: Is debatable whether Russell's concepts, patents, and prototypes instigated and in some measure influenced the compact disc's design. The compact disc is an evolution of LaserDisc technology, where a focused laser beam is used that enables the high information density required for high-quality digital audio signals. Unlike the prior art by Optophonie and James Russell, the information on the disc

3364-460: Is defined as eight bits. It is a signed data type, holding values from −128 to 127. .NET programming languages, such as C# , define byte as an unsigned type, and the sbyte as a signed data type, holding values from 0 to 255, and −128 to 127 , respectively. In data transmission systems, the byte is used as a contiguous sequence of bits in a serial data stream, representing the smallest distinguished unit of data. For asynchronous communication

3480-450: Is defined as the symbol for octet in IEC ;80000-13 and is commonly used in languages such as French and Romanian , and is also combined with metric prefixes for multiples, for example ko and Mo. More than one system exists to define unit multiples based on the byte. Some systems are based on powers of 10 , following the International System of Units (SI), which defines for example

3596-647: Is defined to equal 1,000 bytes—is recommended by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yottabyte (YB), equal to 1000 bytes. The additional prefixes ronna- for 1000 and quetta- for 1000 were adopted by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in 2022. This definition is most commonly used for data-rate units in computer networks , internal bus, hard drive and flash media transfer speeds, and for

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3712-499: Is described in a document produced in 1980 by the format's joint creators, Sony and Philips. The document is known colloquially as the Red Book CD-DA after the color of its cover. The format is a two-channel 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate per channel. Four-channel sound was to be an allowable option within the Red Book format, but has never been implemented. Monaural audio has no existing standard on

3828-608: Is equal to 1,024 (i.e., 2 ) bytes is defined by international standard IEC 80000-13 and is supported by national and international standards bodies ( BIPM , IEC , NIST ). The IEC standard defines eight such multiples, up to 1 yobibyte (YiB), equal to 1024 bytes. The natural binary counterparts to ronna- and quetta- were given in a consultation paper of the International Committee for Weights and Measures' Consultative Committee for Units (CCU) as robi- (Ri, 1024 ) and quebi- (Qi, 1024 ), but have not yet been adopted by

3944-433: Is just as easy to use all six bits in alphanumeric work, or to handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits. All this can be done by pulling the appropriate shift diagonals. An analogous matrix arrangement is used to change from serial to parallel operation at the output of the adder. [...]     byte:     A string that consists of

4060-459: Is often called a nibble , also nybble , which is conveniently represented by a single hexadecimal digit. The term octet unambiguously specifies a size of eight bits. It is used extensively in protocol definitions. Historically, the term octad or octade was used to denote eight bits as well at least in Western Europe; however, this usage is no longer common. The exact origin of

4176-407: Is playable in standard CD players, thus making them backward compatible. CD- MIDI is a format used to store music-performance data, which upon playback is performed by electronic instruments that synthesize the audio. Hence, unlike the original Red Book CD-DA, these recordings are not digitally sampled audio recordings. The CD-MIDI format is defined as an extension of the original Red Book . For

4292-510: Is protected by a film of lacquer normally spin coated directly on the reflective layer. The label is printed on the lacquer layer, usually by screen printing or offset printing . CD data is represented as tiny indentations known as pits , encoded in a spiral track molded into the top of the polycarbonate layer. The areas between pits are known as lands . Each pit is approximately 100  nm deep by 500 nm wide, and varies from 850 nm to 3.5  μm in length. The distance between

4408-514: Is read from a reflective layer using a laser as a light source through a protective substrate. Prototypes were developed by Philips and Sony independently in the late 1970s. Although originally dismissed by Philips Research management as a trivial pursuit, the CD became the primary focus for Philips as the LaserDisc format struggled. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up a joint task force of engineers to design

4524-432: Is stored either in the lead-in area of the CD, where there are roughly five kilobytes of space available or in the subcode channels R to W on the disc, which can store about 31 megabytes. Compact Disc + Graphics is a special audio compact disc that contains graphics data in addition to the audio data on the disc. The disc can be played on a regular audio CD player, but when played on a special CD+G player, it can output

4640-457: Is used here because a given character may be represented in different applications by more than one code, and different codes may use different numbers of bits (ie, different byte sizes). In input-output transmission the grouping of bits may be completely arbitrary and have no relation to actual characters. (The term is coined from bite , but respelled to avoid accidental mutation to bit. )      System/360 took over many of

4756-408: Is used: a change from either pit to land or land to pit indicates a 1, while no change indicates a series of 0s. There must be at least two, and no more than ten 0s between each 1, which is defined by the length of the pit. This, in turn, is decoded by reversing the eight-to-fourteen modulation used in mastering the disc, and then reversing the cross-interleaved Reed–Solomon coding , finally revealing

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4872-584: The IRE Transactions on Electronic Computers , June 1959, page 121. The notions of that paper were elaborated in Chapter 4 of Planning a Computer System (Project Stretch) , edited by W Buchholz, McGraw-Hill Book Company (1962). The rationale for coining the term was explained there on page 40 as follows: Byte denotes a group of bits used to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel to and from input-output units. A term other than character

4988-624: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) as the Federal Information Processing Standard , which replaced the incompatible teleprinter codes in use by different branches of the U.S. government and universities during the 1960s. ASCII included the distinction of upper- and lowercase alphabets and a set of control characters to facilitate the transmission of written language as well as printing device functions, such as page advance and line feed, and

5104-477: The Compact Disc + Graphics (CD+G) format. Like CD+G, CD+EG uses basic CD-ROM features to display text and video information in addition to the music being played. This extra data is stored in subcode channels R-W. Very few CD+EG discs have been published. Super Audio CD (SACD) is a high-resolution, read-only optical audio disc format that was designed to provide higher-fidelity digital audio reproduction than

5220-641: The Compact Disc Digital Audio format which typically provides 74 minutes of audio on a disc. In later years, the compact disc was adapted for non-audio computer data storage purposes as CD-ROM and its derivatives. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc technology to be invented, after the much larger LaserDisc (LD). By 2007, 200 billion CDs (including audio CDs, CD-ROMs and CD-Rs) had been sold worldwide. Standard CDs have

5336-684: The Henry Cow LP Unrest (1974). Contains all the tracks from the Slapp Happy / Henry Cow LP Desperate Straights (1975). Contains all the tracks (the original mixes) from the Henry Cow / Slapp Happy LP In Praise of Learning (1975). Contains all the tracks from the Henry Cow double LP (with Robert Wyatt ) Concerts (1976), plus the Henry Cow tracks on the double LP Greasy Truckers Live at Dingwalls Dance Hall (1973). Contains all

5452-569: The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry 's (IUPAC) Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols attempted to resolve this ambiguity by proposing a set of binary prefixes for the powers of 1024, including kibi (kilobinary), mebi (megabinary), and gibi (gigabinary). In December 1998, the IEC addressed such multiple usages and definitions by adopting the IUPAC's proposed prefixes (kibi, mebi, gibi, etc.) to unambiguously denote powers of 1024. Thus one kibibyte (1 KiB)

5568-512: The Red Book . Introduced in 1999, it was developed by Sony and Philips, the same companies that created the Red Book . SACD was in a format war with DVD-Audio , but neither has replaced audio CDs. The SACD standard is referred to as the Scarlet Book standard. Titles in the SACD format can be issued as hybrid discs; these discs contain the SACD audio stream as well as a standard audio CD layer which

5684-526: The bit endianness . The size of the byte has historically been hardware -dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 six-bit bytes, and persisted, in legacy systems, into

5800-752: The vinyl revival . During the 2010s, the increasing popularity of solid-state media and music streaming services caused automakers to remove automotive CD players in favor of minijack auxiliary inputs, wired connections to USB devices and wireless Bluetooth connections. Automakers viewed CD players as using up valuable space and taking up weight which could be reallocated to more popular features, like large touchscreens. By 2021, only Lexus and General Motors were still including CD players as standard equipment with certain vehicles. CDs continued to be strong in some markets such as Japan where 132 million units were produced in 2019. The decline in CD sales has slowed in recent years; in 2021, CD sales increased in

5916-712: The 120 mm size was adopted. The adoption of EFM in June 1980 allowed 30 percent more playing time that would have resulted in 97 minutes for 120 mm diameter or 74 minutes for a disc as small as 100 millimetres (3.9 in). Instead, the information density was lowered by 30 percent to keep the playing time at 74 minutes. The 120 mm diameter has been adopted by subsequent formats, including Super Audio CD , DVD , HD DVD , and Blu-ray Disc. The 80-millimetre (3.1 in) diameter discs (" Mini CDs ") can hold up to 24 minutes of music or 210 MiB. The logical format of an audio CD (officially Compact Disc Digital Audio or CD-DA)

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6032-601: The 2000s designed as successors to the CD: the Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio . However neither of these were adopted partly due to increased relevance of digital (virtual) music and the apparent lack of audible improvements in audio quality to most human ears. These effectively extended the CD's longevity in the music market. With the advent and popularity of Internet-based distribution of files in lossy-compressed audio formats such as MP3 , sales of CDs began to decline in

6148-502: The 2000s. For example, between 2000 and 2008, despite overall growth in music sales and one anomalous year of increase, major-label CD sales declined overall by 20%. Despite rapidly declining sales year-over-year, the pervasiveness of the technology lingered for a time, with companies placing CDs in pharmacies, supermarkets, and filling station convenience stores to target buyers less likely to be able to use Internet-based distribution. In 2012, CDs and DVDs made up only 34% of music sales in

6264-508: The Adder. The Adder may accept all or only some of the bits.     Assume that it is desired to operate on 4 bit decimal digits , starting at the right. The 0-diagonal is pulsed first, sending out the six bits 0 to 5, of which the Adder accepts only the first four (0-3). Bits 4 and 5 are ignored. Next, the 4 diagonal is pulsed. This sends out bits 4 to 9, of which the last two are again ignored, and so on.     It

6380-467: The CD's introduction, Immink and Joseph Braat presented the first experiments with erasable compact discs during the 73rd AES Convention . In June 1985, the computer-readable CD-ROM (read-only memory) and, in 1990, recordable CD-R discs were introduced. Recordable CDs became an alternative to tape for recording and distributing music and could be duplicated without degradation in sound quality. Other newer video formats such as DVD and Blu-ray use

6496-472: The DAC. Even when using high-precision components, this approach was prone to decoding errors. Another issue was jitter , a time-related defect. Confronted with the instability of DACs, manufacturers initially turned to increasing the number of bits in the DAC and using several DACs per audio channel, averaging their output. This increased the cost of CD players but did not solve the core problem. A breakthrough in

6612-511: The IEC and ISO. An alternative system of nomenclature for the same units (referred to here as the customary convention ), in which 1 kilobyte (KB) is equal to 1,024 bytes, 1 megabyte (MB) is equal to 1024 bytes and 1 gigabyte (GB) is equal to 1024 bytes is mentioned by a 1990s JEDEC standard. Only the first three multiples (up to GB) are mentioned by the JEDEC standard, which makes no mention of TB and larger. While confusing and incorrect,

6728-674: The Orckestra , a merger of Henry Cow, the Mike Westbrook Brass Band and folk singer Frankie Armstrong in 1977. The two bonus CD Orckestra tracks were later reissued on the 2019 Henry Cow Box Redux: The Complete Henry Cow bonus CD, Ex Box – Collected Fragments 1971–1978 . The CDs featured here are the 1998 to 2006 reissues by Recommended Records and contain the original LP mixes . (Remixed versions of Legend and In Praise of Learning were issued in 1991 by East Side Digital Records .) Concerts and Western Culture include

6844-502: The Shift Matrix to be used to convert a 60-bit word , coming from Memory in parallel, into characters , or 'bytes' as we have called them, to be sent to the Adder serially. The 60 bits are dumped into magnetic cores on six different levels. Thus, if a 1 comes out of position 9, it appears in all six cores underneath. Pulsing any diagonal line will send the six bits stored along that line to

6960-473: The Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes, which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum, and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing.     Since then the term byte has generally meant 8 bits, and it has thus passed into the general vocabulary.     Are there any other terms coined especially for

7076-621: The System/360 led to the ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size, while in detail the EBCDIC and ASCII encoding schemes are different. In the early 1960s, AT&T introduced digital telephony on long-distance trunk lines . These used the eight-bit μ-law encoding . This large investment promised to reduce transmission costs for eight-bit data. In Volume 1 of The Art of Computer Programming (first published in 1968), Donald Knuth uses byte in his hypothetical MIX computer to denote

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7192-448: The US for the first time since 2004, with Axios citing its rise to "young people who are finding they like hard copies of music in the digital age". It came at the same time as both vinyl and cassette reached sales levels not seen in 30 years. The RIAA reported that CD revenue made a dip in 2022, before increasing again in 2023 and overtook downloading for the first time in over a decade. In

7308-517: The US, 33.4 million CD albums were sold in the year 2022. In France in 2023, 10.5 million CDs were sold, almost double that of vinyl, but both of them represented generated 12% each of the French music industry revenues. Sony and Philips received praise for the development of the compact disc from professional organizations. These awards include: A CD is made from 1.2-millimetre (0.047 in) thick, polycarbonate plastic, and weighs 14–33 grams. From

7424-665: The United States. By 2015, only 24% of music in the United States was purchased on physical media, two thirds of this consisting of CDs; however, in the same year in Japan, over 80% of music was bought on CDs and other physical formats. In 2018, U.S. CD sales were 52 million units—less than 6% of the peak sales volume in 2000. In the UK, 32 million units were sold, almost 100 million fewer than in 2008. In 2018, Best Buy announced plans to decrease their focus on CD sales, however, while continuing to sell records, sales of which are growing during

7540-571: The binary and decimal definitions of multiples of the byte have generally ended in favor of the manufacturers, with courts holding that the legal definition of gigabyte or GB is 1 GB = 1 000 000 000 (10 ) bytes (the decimal definition), rather than the binary definition (2 , i.e., 1 073 741 824 ). Specifically, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California held that "the U.S. Congress has deemed

7656-516: The bonus tracks present on their respective CD reissues. The box set's album covers are CD-sized cardboard replicas of the original LP covers. The album cover art work was by artist Ray Smith and was originally used on Henry Cow's debut album, Legend (1973). Contains all the tracks (the US/Japanese vinyl mixes) from the Henry Cow LP Legend (1973). Contains all the tracks from

7772-406: The bottom of the polycarbonate layer. The change in height between pits and lands results in a difference in the way the light is reflected. Because the pits are indented into the top layer of the disc and are read through the transparent polycarbonate base, the pits form bumps when read. The laser hits the disc, casting a circle of light wider than the modulated spiral track reflecting partially from

7888-543: The byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures . To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol ( RFC   791 ) refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet . Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on

8004-449: The capacities of most storage media , particularly hard drives , flash -based storage, and DVDs . Operating systems that use this definition include macOS , iOS , Ubuntu , and Debian . It is also consistent with the other uses of the SI prefixes in computing, such as CPU clock speeds or measures of performance . A system of units based on powers of 2 in which 1 kibibyte (KiB)

8120-451: The center of the disc and proceeds toward the edge, which allows adaptation to the different sizes available. Standard CDs are available in two sizes. By far, the most common is 120 millimetres (4.7 in) in diameter, with a 74-, 80, 90, or 99-minute audio capacity and a 650, 700, 800, or 870 MiB (737,280,000-byte) data capacity. Discs are 1.2 millimetres (0.047 in) thick, with a 15 millimetres (0.59 in) center hole. The size of

8236-407: The center outward, components are: the center spindle hole (15 mm), the first-transition area (clamping ring), the clamping area (stacking ring), the second-transition area (mirror band), the program (data) area, and the rim. The inner program area occupies a radius from 25 to 58 mm. A thin layer of aluminum or, more rarely, gold is applied to the surface, making it reflective. The metal

8352-450: The compact disc has been credited to the cooperation between Philips and Sony, which together agreed upon and developed compatible hardware. The unified design of the compact disc allowed consumers to purchase any disc or player from any company and allowed the CD to dominate the at-home music market unchallenged. In 1974, Lou Ottens, director of the audio division of Philips, started a small group to develop an analog optical audio disc with

8468-448: The computer field which have found their way into general dictionaries of English language?     1956 Summer: Gerrit Blaauw , Fred Brooks , Werner Buchholz , John Cocke and Jim Pomerene join the Stretch team. Lloyd Hunter provides transistor leadership.     1956 July [ sic ]: In a report Werner Buchholz lists the advantages of

8584-627: The customary convention is used by the Microsoft Windows operating system and random-access memory capacity, such as main memory and CPU cache size, and in marketing and billing by telecommunication companies, such as Vodafone , AT&T , Orange and Telstra . For storage capacity, the customary convention was used by macOS and iOS through Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iOS 10, after which they switched to units based on powers of 10. Various computer vendors have coined terms for data of various sizes, sometimes with different sizes for

8700-454: The decimal definition of gigabyte to be the 'preferred' one for the purposes of 'U.S. trade and commerce' [...] The California Legislature has likewise adopted the decimal system for all 'transactions in this state. ' " Earlier lawsuits had ended in settlement with no court ruling on the question, such as a lawsuit against drive manufacturer Western Digital . Western Digital settled the challenge and added explicit disclaimers to products that

8816-423: The diagonal of an audio cassette. Heitaro Nakajima , who developed an early digital audio recorder within Japan's national public broadcasting organization, NHK , in 1970, became general manager of Sony's audio department in 1971. In 1973, his team developed a digital PCM adaptor that made audio recordings using a Betamax video recorder. After this, in 1974 the leap to storing digital audio on an optical disc

8932-406: The entire market share in regard to US music sales . The CD is considered the last dominant audio format of the album era , as the rise of MP3 , iTunes , cellular ringtones , and other downloadable music formats in the mid-2000s ended the decade-long dominance of the CD. The format was later adapted (as CD-ROM ) for general purpose data storage and initially could hold much more data than

9048-508: The first few years of its existence, the CD was a medium used purely for audio. In 1988, the Yellow Book CD-ROM standard was established by Sony and Philips, which defined a non-volatile optical data computer data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. Video CD (VCD, View CD, and Compact Disc digital video) is a standard digital format for storing video media on

9164-458: The first four UK albums by the Beatles were released in mono on compact disc. The growing acceptance of the CD in 1983 marks the beginning of the popular digital audio revolution. It was enthusiastically received, especially in the early-adopting classical music and audiophile communities, and its handling quality received particular praise. As the price of players gradually came down, and with

9280-804: The format included: The first artist to sell a million copies on CD was Dire Straits , with their 1985 album Brothers in Arms . One of the first CD markets was devoted to reissuing popular music whose commercial potential was already proven. The first major artist to have their entire catalog converted to CD was David Bowie , whose first fourteen studio albums (up to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) ) of (then) sixteen were made available by RCA Records in February 1985, along with four greatest hits albums; his fifteenth and sixteenth albums ( Let's Dance and Tonight , respectively) had already been issued on CD by EMI Records in 1983 and 1984, respectively. On 26 February 1987,

9396-469: The former sense of the word, harking back to the days when bytes were not yet standardized." The development of eight-bit microprocessors in the 1970s popularized this storage size. Microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 , the direct predecessor of the 8086 , could also perform a small number of operations on the four-bit pairs in a byte, such as the decimal-add-adjust (DAA) instruction. A four-bit quantity

9512-471: The hole was chosen by Joop Sinjou and based on a Dutch 10-cent coin: a dubbeltje . Philips/Sony patented the physical dimensions. The official Philips history says the capacity was specified by Sony executive Norio Ohga to be able to contain the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. This is a myth according to Kees Immink , as the EFM code format had not yet been decided in December 1979, when

9628-554: The input and output. However, the LINK Computer can be equipped to edit out these gaps and to permit handling of bytes which are split between words. [...]     [...] The maximum input-output byte size for serial operation will now be 8 bits, not counting any error detection and correction bits. Thus, the Exchange will operate on an 8-bit byte basis, and any input-output units with less than 8 bits per byte will leave

9744-428: The instruction. It is a deliberate respelling of bite to avoid accidental mutation to bit . Another origin of byte for bit groups smaller than a computer's word size, and in particular groups of four bits , is on record by Louis G. Dooley, who claimed he coined the term while working with Jules Schwartz and Dick Beeler on an air defense system called SAGE at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1956 or 1957, which

9860-418: The integral data type unsigned char must hold at least 256 different values, and is represented by at least eight bits (clause 5.2.4.2.1). Various implementations of C and C++ reserve 8, 9, 16, 32, or 36 bits for the storage of a byte. In addition, the C and C++ standards require that there are no gaps between two bytes. This means every bit in memory is part of a byte. Java's primitive data type byte

9976-505: The introduction of the portable Discman , the CD began to gain popularity in the larger popular and rock music markets. With the rise in CD sales, pre-recorded cassette tape sales began to decline in the late 1980s; CD sales overtook cassette sales in the early 1990s. In 1988, 400 million CDs were manufactured by 50 pressing plants around the world. Early CD players employed binary-weighted digital-to-analog converters (DAC), which contained individual electrical components for each bit of

10092-476: The label side of the disc. Scratches on the clear side can be repaired by refilling them with similar refractive plastic or by careful polishing. The edges of CDs are sometimes incompletely sealed, allowing gases and liquids to enter the CD and corrode the metal reflective layer and/or interfere with the focus of the laser on the pits, a condition known as disc rot . The fungus Geotrichum candidum has been found—under conditions of high heat and humidity—to consume

10208-510: The lands and partially from the top of any bumps where they are present. As the laser passes over a pit (bump), its height means that the round trip path of the light reflected from its peak is 1/2 wavelength out of phase with the light reflected from the land around it. This is because the height of a bump is around 1/4 of the wavelength of the light used, so the light falls 1/4 out of phase before reflection and another 1/4 wavelength out of phase after reflection. This causes partial cancellation of

10324-419: The laser's reflection from the surface. By measuring the reflected intensity change with a photodiode , a modulated signal is read back from the disc. To accommodate the spiral pattern of data, the laser is placed on a mobile mechanism within the disc tray of any CD player. This mechanism typically takes the form of a sled that moves along a rail. The sled can be driven by a worm gear or linear motor . Where

10440-414: The last, of IBM's second-generation transistorized computers to be developed).     The first reference found in the files was contained in an internal memo written in June 1956 during the early days of developing Stretch . A byte was described as consisting of any number of parallel bits from one to six. Thus a byte was assumed to have a length appropriate for the occasion. Its first use

10556-428: The late 1980s culminated in development of the 1-bit DAC , which converts high-resolution low-frequency digital input signal into a lower-resolution high-frequency signal that is mapped to voltages and then smoothed with an analog filter. The temporary use of a lower-resolution signal simplified circuit design and improved efficiency, which is why it became dominant in CD players starting from the early 1990s. Philips used

10672-455: The number of words transmitted to or from an input-output unit in response to a single input-output instruction. Block size is a structural property of an input-output unit; it may have been fixed by the design or left to be varied by the program.     [...] Most important, from the point of view of editing, will be the ability to handle any characters or digits, from 1 to 6 bits long.     Figure 2 shows

10788-456: The physical or logical control of data flow over the transmission media. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the eight-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC), an expansion of their six-bit binary-coded decimal (BCDIC) representations used in earlier card punches. The prominence of

10904-533: The polycarbonate plastic and aluminium found in CDs. The data integrity of compact discs can be measured using surface error scanning , which can measure the rates of different types of data errors, known as C1 , C2 , CU and extended (finer-grain) error measurements known as E11 , E12 , E21 , E22 , E31 and E32 , of which higher rates indicate a possibly damaged or unclean data surface, low media quality, deteriorating media and recordable media written to by

11020-452: The potential ambiguity of the term "byte". The symbol for octet, 'o', also conveniently eliminates the ambiguity in the symbol 'B' between byte and bel . The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer, which had addressing to the bit and variable field length (VFL) instructions with a byte size encoded in

11136-455: The prefix kilo as 1000 (10 ); other systems are based on powers of two . Nomenclature for these systems has led to confusion. Systems based on powers of 10 use standard SI prefixes ( kilo , mega , giga , ...) and their corresponding symbols (k, M, G, ...). Systems based on powers of 2, however, might use binary prefixes ( kibi , mebi , gibi , ...) and their corresponding symbols (Ki, Mi, Gi, ...) or they might use

11252-525: The prefixes K, M, and G, creating ambiguity when the prefixes M or G are used. While the difference between the decimal and binary interpretations is relatively small for the kilobyte (about 2% smaller than the kibibyte), the systems deviate increasingly as units grow larger (the relative deviation grows by 2.4% for each three orders of magnitude). For example, a power-of-10-based terabyte is about 9% smaller than power-of-2-based tebibyte. Definition of prefixes using powers of 10—in which 1 kilobyte (symbol kB)

11368-538: The raw data stored on the disc. These encoding techniques (defined in the Red Book ) were originally designed for CD Digital Audio , but they later became a standard for almost all CD formats (such as CD-ROM ). CDs are susceptible to damage during handling and from environmental exposure. Pits are much closer to the label side of a disc, enabling defects and contaminants on the clear side to be out of focus during playback. Consequently, CDs are more likely to suffer damage on

11484-432: The same physical geometry as CD, and most DVD and Blu-ray players are backward compatible with audio CDs. CD sales in the United States peaked by 2000. By the early 2000s, the CD player had largely replaced the audio cassette player as standard equipment in new automobiles, with 2010 being the final model year for any car in the United States to have a factory-equipped cassette player. Two new formats were marketed in

11600-450: The same term even within a single vendor. These terms include double word , half word , long word , quad word , slab , superword and syllable . There are also informal terms. e.g., half byte and nybble for 4 bits, octal K for 1000 8 . Contemporary computer memory has a binary architecture making a definition of memory units based on powers of 2 most practical. The use of the metric prefix kilo for binary multiples arose as

11716-481: The same-sized disc. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres (2.4 to 3.1 in); they have been used for CD singles or delivering device drivers . The CD gained rapid popularity in the 1990s, quickly outselling all other audio formats in the United States by 1991, ending the market dominance of the phonograph record and the cassette tape . By 2000, the CD accounted for 92.3% of

11832-503: The standard in 1996. Philips coined the term compact disc in line with another audio product, the Compact Cassette , and contributed the general manufacturing process , based on video LaserDisc technology. Philips also contributed eight-to-fourteen modulation (EFM), while Sony contributed the error-correction method, CIRC, which offers resilience to defects such as scratches and fingerprints. The Compact Disc Story , told by

11948-519: The term is unclear, but it can be found in British, Dutch, and German sources of the 1960s and 1970s, and throughout the documentation of Philips mainframe computers. The unit symbol for the byte is specified in IEC 80000-13 , IEEE 1541 and the Metric Interchange Format as the upper-case character B. In the International System of Quantities (ISQ), B is also the symbol of the bel ,

12064-600: The tracks from the Henry Cow LP Western Culture (1979). Contains previously unreleased material taken from live performances in Europe by the Orckestra in March–May 1978. Given to advance subscribers of the box set. Compact Disc 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. It uses

12180-719: The twenty-first century. In this era, bit groupings in the instruction stream were often referred to as syllables or slab , before the term byte became common. The modern de facto standard of eight bits, as documented in ISO/IEC 2382-1:1993, is a convenient power of two permitting the binary-encoded values 0 through 255 for one byte, as 2 to the power of 8 is 256. The international standard IEC 80000-13 codified this common meaning. Many types of applications use information representable in eight or fewer bits and processor designers commonly optimize for this usage. The popularity of major commercial computing architectures has aided in

12296-516: The ubiquitous acceptance of the 8-bit byte. Modern architectures typically use 32- or 64-bit words, built of four or eight bytes, respectively. The unit symbol for the byte was designated as the upper-case letter B by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Internationally, the unit octet explicitly defines a sequence of eight bits, eliminating

12412-425: The usable capacity may differ from the advertised capacity. Seagate was sued on similar grounds and also settled. Many programming languages define the data type byte . The C and C++ programming languages define byte as an "addressable unit of data storage large enough to hold any member of the basic character set of the execution environment" (clause 3.6 of the C standard). The C standard requires that

12528-420: The windings (the pitch ) is 1.6 μm (measured center-to-center, not between the edges). When playing an audio CD, a motor within the CD player spins the disc to a scanning velocity of 1.2–1.4 m/s ( constant linear velocity , CLV)—equivalent to approximately 500 RPM at the inside of the disc, and approximately 200 RPM at the outside edge. The track on the CD begins at the inside and spirals outward so

12644-404: Was advertised as "110 Kbyte", using the 1000 convention. Likewise, the 8-inch DEC RX01 floppy (1975) held 256 256 bytes formatted, and was advertised as "256k". Some devices were advertised using a mixture of the two definitions: most notably, floppy disks advertised as "1.44 MB" have an actual capacity of 1440 KiB , the equivalent of 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB. In 1995,

12760-468: Was an early device that used light for both recording and playback of sound signals on a transparent photograph . More than thirty years later, American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital media on a photosensitive plate. Russell's patent application was filed in 1966, and he was granted a patent in 1970. Following litigation, Sony and Philips licensed Russell's patents for recording in 1988. It

12876-498: Was chosen because it is half the vertical and half the horizontal resolution of the NTSC video. 352×288 is a similarly one-quarter PAL/SECAM resolution. This approximates the (overall) resolution of an analog VHS tape, which, although it has double the number of (vertical) scan lines, has a much lower horizontal resolution. Mebibyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits . Historically,

12992-459: Was easily made. Sony first publicly demonstrated an optical digital audio disc in September 1976. A year later, in September 1977, Sony showed the press a 30 cm (12 in) disc that could play an hour of digital audio (44,100 Hz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution) using modified frequency modulation encoding. In September 1978, the company demonstrated an optical digital audio disc with

13108-515: Was in the context of the input-output equipment of the 1950s, which handled six bits at a time. The possibility of going to 8-bit bytes was considered in August 1956 and incorporated in the design of Stretch shortly thereafter .     The first published reference to the term occurred in 1959 in a paper ' Processing Data in Bits and Pieces ' by G A Blaauw , F P Brooks Jr and W Buchholz in

13224-530: Was jointly developed by Rand , MIT, and IBM. Later on, Schwartz's language JOVIAL actually used the term, but the author recalled vaguely that it was derived from AN/FSQ-31 . Early computers used a variety of four-bit binary-coded decimal (BCD) representations and the six-bit codes for printable graphic patterns common in the U.S. Army ( FIELDATA ) and Navy . These representations included alphanumeric characters and special graphical symbols. These sets were expanded in 1963 to seven bits of coding, called

13340-509: Was published on 1 March 1979. A week later, on 8 March, Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called "Philips Introduce Compact Disc" in Eindhoven , Netherlands. Sony executive Norio Ohga , later CEO and chairman of Sony, and Heitaro Nakajima were convinced of the format's commercial potential and pushed further development despite widespread skepticism. In 1979, Sony and Philips set up

13456-468: Was working on IBM's Project Stretch in the mid 1950s. His letter tells the story.     Not being a regular reader of your magazine, I heard about the question in the November 1976 issue regarding the origin of the term "byte" from a colleague who knew that I had perpetrated this piece of jargon [see page 77 of November 1976 BYTE, "Olde Englishe"] . I searched my files and could not locate

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