History of Computers - Digital Versatile Disc

The Digital Versatile Disc, invented in 1995 by the combined efforts of corporate groups including Sony, Philips, Toshiba, and Time Warner, is an optical disc storage unit, used mostly for video and data storage. It has become the standard medium for common video storage, although some would speculate that it is posed to be overcome by a more recent, more space-efficient disc option, Blu-Ray.

Overview

Since its invention in the mid 1990's, the DVD has been used mostly for video media, although it can also be used for data storage. The DVD as we know it today resulted from a fusion of two other media discs in development by rival companies. Seeking to avoid a repeat of the costly format war between VHS and Betamax, Philips and Sony abandoned their MMCD format and backed up Toshiba's SD format, with a minor change in tracking technology that makes the disc much more robust while only sacrificing 5% of data storage. This change resulted in the standard DVD having 4.7 GB as opposed to the original 5 GB. While originally there were limited options, now it is possible to find DVD's in many formats. DVD's come in many different types and variations. Some of the most common are DVD-R (recordable), DVD-RW (recordable, erasable, and re-recordable), and DVD-RAM (random access memory) ^[1]. Many differing variations on the DVD include changes in laser resolution, number of layers, number of sides utilized, type of data storage, and less frequently, diameter of the disc. Given the multitude of options available to DVD manufacturers, DVD's come in myriad data storage sizes, in many different formats.

Significance

The main medium for video storage prior to the advent of the DVD was the VHS tape, a magnetic tape that had secured a wide commercial base since its triumph over Betamax in the 1981 conclusion to their formatting war. Upon its arrival in the U.S. in 1996, the DVD format slowly phased out VHS tapes, and by 2003, it had surpassed it in sales, an event closely followed by the announcement by many major retailers that VHS would cease to be sold ^[2]. The DVD is significant to the history of computer's because it shifted video media from magnetic tape that degrades quickly to a robust form of digital media that takes up less room, and can easily be accessed by a multitude of devices ^[3]. Besides the obvious positive aspects of switching to a digital medium, the DVD also paved the way for the disc media of the future, most notably Blu-Ray, which, as recently as 2008, beat out the Toshiba-backed HD DVD format to become the clear successor to the DVD medium.