History (1993): 1993 Being CD-ROM Year

The growth of the worldwide CD-ROM drive market, between 1992 and 1993, is outstanding:

• +78% for Freeman Associates with sales exceeding 4 million drives in 1993;
• +149% for Disk/Trend that forecasts sales of 6.3 million units in the same year.
• Dataquest brings out a 4.8 million estimation, still in the current year.
• At the end of 1992, Infotech brought count of a 5 million drive population with the following distribution: 3 million in the US, 1.4 million in Asia and 600,000 in Europe (185,000 in the UK, 125,000 in Germany, 85,000 in Italy, 50,000 in France, 30,000 in Sweden, 25,000 in the Netherlands and 100,000 for the other countries) .

Long waiting
Those who had faith in it had to wait some time before it became fruitful.

The first presentation of a CD-ROM by Philips and Sony in the US was in 1985.

But this time, the market took off, despite the impossibility of writing on the medium and the sluggishness of a device based on the audio technology.

Philips hopes to sell one million drives this year, Apple about 1.5 million.

The reasons of success
Many reasons for this takeoff. First, the price of the device has considerably lowered. You can now find on the market units as low as $200, and prices will keep on dropping as competition is strong between many manufacturers. If you compare the price of the drive to the capacity of a single disk, 600MB, it’s even the cheapest unit per MB and, additionally, disks are interchangeable with a well-established standard.

The amount of titles published on CD-ROMs, over 5,000 throughout the world, is continuously increasing.

Here again prices, high at the beginning, are also dropping on account of lower manufacturing costs and increases in sales.

In the Unix environment, greedy in software sizes, most workstation manufacturers have adopted small optical disks to distribute their software with their instructions. And soon it will be the same for Microsoft and Windows.

The advent of CD-WORM units, with prices also dropping, will allow a smaller quantity production for a limited distribution.

Furthermore, CD-ROMs just like compression/uncompression systems are a necessary tool as soon as you enter multimedia applications, now counting many adepts, or high quality video games. The pushing of main computer manufacturers (Apple or IBM) is spurring multimedia, thus CD-ROMs. Some manufacturers, like Apple, IBM or Compaq incorporate an internal drive in their standard configuration.

And even if their success in the consumer market is not what had expected their instigators, Eastman Kodak and Philips, Photo CDs and CD-Is are significant vectors of the market growth of the latest devices that almost all integrate the possibility of using Photo CDs, even multisession, CD-Is, CD XAs and MPCs.

Finally, drive performances are improving. The best example is Pioneer’s latest drive, the DRM-604X, that practically doubles the transfer rate with 600KB/s, compared to 340 to 380KB/s from its best competitors and 170KB/s on its first units.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 68, published on September 1993.