Building on the success of the audio CD, Philips and Sony unveiled the CD-ROM specification, allowing compact discs to store up to 550 megabytes of computer data, an enormous leap over floppy disks of the era. The format would go on to enable everything from multimedia encyclopedias to software distribution and PC gaming through the 1990s.
The compact disc had already revolutionized music since its 1982 introduction, but engineers at Philips and Sony recognized its potential to solve a much bigger problem: the era's floppy disks held barely more than a megabyte, hopelessly inadequate for the graphics, sound, and video that software developers wanted to include in their products.
A single CD-ROM could hold roughly 400 times the data of a standard floppy disk, an almost unimaginable leap that opened the door to multimedia software packed with digitized photographs, speech, and music. Early adopters imagined vast encyclopedias and reference libraries fitting on a single shiny disc, and companies scrambled to build the CD-ROM drives needed to read them.
The standard laid essential groundwork for the multimedia PC boom of the following decade, when CD-ROM drives became standard equipment, delivering everything from Encyclopaedia Britannica to Myst and Doom to millions of households, before DVDs and eventually broadband internet made the format feel quaint.