On July 14th, 1995, the mp3 was born!
Its the tenth anniversary since the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS researchers who came up with the mp3 sound compression format decided mp3 was a much easier name to remember than “ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3”.
Thank goodness they did. Can you imagine the anchor guys trying to get their collective tongues around that mouthful every time they reported on the advent of music file sharing and the emergence of the portable digital music player over the last decade.
With a great lack of foresight, however, the Fraunhofer team suggested that their audio codec, first developed in 1992, would be far “too complex for practical application”. This less than famous proclamation won’t go down in history like Bill Gates’ alleged questioning of the need for a PC to have more 640 kilobytes of RAM. But, no one living in this century could fail to appreciate the omnipresence of ISO standard IS 11172-3 MPEG Audio Layer 3 today. Unless they’ve only ever heard of iTunes and bypassed Napster, WinMX, Gnutella, Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey, Torrents, etc etc…
Of course, in defence of the Fraunhofer guys it has to be mentioned that they moved on a long while ago and came up with mpeg4…
By the way, if you’re one of the many readers who hit this page looking for the kids party song, try this link to search Google for the happy birthday mp3.