Throwback Thursday

Thirteen years ago today, Toshiba introduced the first HD DVD players in U.S. stores with high hopes that the new format would be the high-definition successor to the wildly popular DVD and conquer the rival Blu-ray format championed by a coalition of nine companies, including Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Samsung.

Ten years ago today, Apple introduced the iPhone, a sleek device that made the BlackBerry (a.k.a. “crackberry”) and other “smartphones” of the day seem clunky and dull. A device that would redefine the smartphone and, ultimately, change the world.

Ten years ago this week, a protracted format war between the Sony’s Blu-ray format and the Toshiba-backed HD DVD format, each vying to be the anointed successor to DVD, was averted when Toshiba announced that it would stop making HD DVD players, even though close to a million players had been sold and more than 400 HD DVD titles had been released in the U.S.

Nine years ago this week, Apple announced that “music fans have purchased and downloaded over 10 billion songs from the iTunes Store.”

The week of May 23rd is a landmark week in the annals of Star Wars history. Return of the Jedi hit theaters on May 25, 1983, six years to the day after the original Star Wars (later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope) forever altered the course of space-themed Sci-Fi in 1977, not to mention special effects and movie sound.

A promising new movie format called DVD was the theme of the August 1998 issue of Stereo Review, the 40-year-old magazine that would take on a new identity six months later with the debut of Sound & Vision.