The CD-ROM is a very first clear materialisation of media convergence, a key step in digital storage and a path towards digitalisation in the 1990s. It perfectly illustrates the high hopes for multimedia and digitalisation but also the shortening life cycles of innovation and the dynamics of media convergence.
The CD-Hist project, funded by the FNR for 2 years, intends to retrieve the history of CD-Roms at the intersection of media history, digital studies, the history of digital technology and media archaeology. It draws on a wide range of sources including born-digital heritage, as many CD-ROMs have been preserved in national libraries and by the Internet Archive.
Photo by Matthias Zepper, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
