American inventor James T. Russell has been credited with inventing the first system to record digital information
Compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format. The format was originally developed to store and play only sound recordings but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). Several other formats were further derived from these, including write-once audio and data storage .
At the time of the technology's introduction, an individual CD had greater capacity than a typical personal computer hard drive. The reverse is now true, with personal computer hard drives having capacities far exceeding the capacity of a CD.