The Birth of MP3, Winchips Become Discontinued (PCGH-Retro, July 14)

…1995: Listening to music on the PC is not a problem, CD-ROM drives and sound cards are now standard equipment on every modern computer. But copying the music to the HDD is a luxury that hardly anyone can afford given the low capacity – the content of a single audio CD would occupy the entire capacity of 1995 commercially available hard drives. Classic data compression, such as the widespread ZIP format, is of little help here. A method for audio data compression that has been in development at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen since 1982 follows a different approach: MPEG Audio Layer 3, a compression method that draws on findings from psychoacoustics and on the one hand only stores those frequencies that the human ear can perceive on the other also involves interrelationships and mutual cancellation of frequencies. This greatly reduces the size of audio files. The technology has been in place since 1992 and is part of the MPEG-1 specification; the necessary encoding software has also been available since 1994. The only thing missing from the new standard is a real name, the first files are given the provisional ending .bit. However, that ended on July 14, 1995: after a internal survey at the Fraunhofer Institute the development team decides to use the file abbreviation .mp3. The MP3 format is born – and will soon start a revolution in the music industry.

…1999: Developing a processor for PCs that cost less than $1,000: Centaur Technology was founded in 1995 as the CPU division of IDT with this plan. And that worked at first, the processors of the Winchip series were very slow, but economical and, above all, cheap. But that’s over now: On July 14, 1999, IDT announces its exit from the x86 market, and the Centaur forge is to be sold. IBM and Acer are initially traded as possible takeover candidates, in fact Centaur later goes to Via – where the Winchip processors are sold under the name of the Cyrix team that was also taken over.