Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I’m still importing my music CDs into my iTunes. I am now up to 1358 songs, and currently importing the Beatles White Album.
Handling CDs over an extended period, I’ve noticed how the CD packaging and CDs, themselves, have changed over time. Some of my older CDs, such as White Album, have thick, heavy plastic cases; the newer ones are thin, light, or even made of paper. The older CDs are thicker, and seem more durable; the newer are so thin they seem to be made of dragonfly wings.
I can’t remember buying my first CD player, or my first CD. According to this page at Philips, the first CD pressings for commercial sale happened in August of 1982. By the following January, half a million CDs had been sold.
1982. That was one year later than when DOS was invented, and one year before the release of Apple’s Lisa personal computer. That was 23, almost 24 years ago–older than some of you reading this. This means that many of you have never played a record in a record player; or tapes that used to get hung up in the cassette players, and turn into the same curly mess as our afros.
My ex-husband and I had a CD player our second Christmas together, I remember that. Or was it a cassette player? It was one or the other, I remember that. What I can’t remember is the year we got married. For the life of me, I can’t remember when we got married. Was in 1983? I can remember the stereo (it could play albums, still, so it must have been a cassette player); the place we lived (an apartment, with an artificial stream that attracted ducks in the winter); the city (Phoenix); even what I wore Christmas day (a light pink satin nighty with a darker rose satin robe with delicate lace down the front).
We had adopted a pregnant cat who had given birth to three kittens about 2 months before. I can remember them tearing at the Christmas tree and sleeping as a bundle on my lap. I had a perm, and my hair was a thick mass of curls.
I can remember the year we divorced: 2002, in Boston. (Actually it was in 2001: the year the dot-com I worked at closed, started my first weblog, took my one and only trip to London, and then moved to San Francisco because it seemed like a cool place to live.) We still lived together; something the judge commented on–perplexed at our friendliness after session after session of couples loathing one another. When we moved apart, I can remember splitting up the CD collection: his and hers. But I can’t remember the year we were married, or the first CD we bought. It’s in the pile I’m digitalizing right now. Somewhere.
