He invented it to listen to music, but the creation of the digital compact disc revolutionized technology.

Born in Bremerton, Washington in 1931, James T. Russell, the inventor of the compact disc, said that he believes the use of CDs for music will inevitably decline. Mr. Russell said he believes that the format will live on, however, for expensive programs because consumers value the security of a disc.

In 1953 Mr. Russell graduated with a degree in physics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon and joined General Electric labs in Richland, Washington.

An avid music listener, Mr. Russell became unsatisfied with the audio quality of his vinyl phonograph records and sought to invent a better music recoding system.

Mr. Russell said that if the recording industry is able to organize a proper future for selling music online, the audio disc will go extinct. He invented the digital compact disc in the late 1960s after joining the Pacific Northwest Laboratory of Battelle Memorial Institute in Richland.

“I didn’t originally foresee that [music] was going to cost as much as it does,” he said. “I really think the record industry is being a bit backward in how they view marketing for music. I don’t think it should cost as much.”

Mr. Russell said that the current cost for audio CDs will force more marketing online unless album prices are cut to a more reasonable level.

Stating that hard drives have failed to create a permanent archive for storage, Mr. Russell said he believes that some music will transition overtime from the CD to a form of music DVD, because the quality of the CD is not as clear as he originally envisioned.

Mr. Russell said he didn’t believe Apple’s new MacBook Air signaled that CDs were becoming outdated.

“It’s a marketing strategy on the part of Apple,” he said. “I’m not discouraging it. A good many people don’t need a disc drive for many things they do. That’s fine. …In some respects it makes it sexier.”

Pleased that Blu-Ray technology will make the DVD market more robust and increase the number of discs manufactured, Mr. Russell said that the new format will extend the life of the DVD.

“If [Sony] had asked me I would have suggested some different ways of doing it,” Mr. Russell said. “Certainly the Blu-Ray was more of a technological tour de force. Whether it turns out to have more trouble… I do not know.”

Companies that store information online will increasingly become an attractive market, Mr. Russell said, though he said he believed people will always want personal files and financial records in hand, giving life to the disc.

Crusading for the environment, Mr. Russell once envisioned that newspapers and magazines would one day be delivered by disc, eliminating the need to cut down trees to produce paper. He now recognizes that the Internet has largely given life to the next form of news delivery.

In his eyes, all it would take to complete the transition would be a national increase in Internet bandwidth. But physical media will be around for a while to come, he argued.

With 54 U.S. patents behind him, Mr. Russell said he thought that the disc format would only perish when the hard drive is replaced.

“With the present range of hardware the optical disc is not going to disappear. Period. It’s a requirement,” he said.

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Compact discs, the digital file storage medium for documents and music among other things, may be spinning toward the fate of the floppy: Extinction.

Beginning with Apple’s debut of the MacBook Air which is sold sans disc drive, the future of the CD drive, a landmark component of personal computers, has come into question.

“Customers don’t need internal disc drives, they just think they do,” Leander Kahney, author of the upcoming book “Inside Steve’s Brain,” said.

A Daring Past

When Apple released the original iMac in 1998 the computer industry slowly realized that the traditional floppy disk was on a death march.

Fast forward a decade to the debut of the MacBook Air, the laptop Apple calls “the world’s thinnest,” and the first thing some consumers notice is the missing disc drive.

“The MacBook Air is exactly analogous to the original iMac,” Kahney said. “There were howls of outrage from customers, and some pundits said the absence of a floppy drive would doom the iMac.”

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was even uncertain about the move according to an ex-Apple engineer Kahney spoke to. The iMac, however, went on to be best-selling computer of all time Kahney said, and consumers didn’t need disks as much as they thought.

“I don’t think Apple is convincing anyone that they need to get rid of their optical drive,” said Ryan Block, the Editor-In-Chief of Engadget, a web magazine featuring daily coverage of electronics. “There’s no substitution for it.”

Tom Krazit, author of the Apple blog “One More Thing” for CNET News, said that “the iMac was a little more daring at the time, since people were still using lots of disk drives and the Internet was not nearly as pervasive.”

Block said that when Apple dropped the floppy drive from the iMac it was sending a message that computer users needed to “let go of the past,” something that the company did rapidly when Steve Jobs took over as CEO the year before.

A Drive Toward Death

This time, Block said, the company is ditching the familiar in hopes of stretching the size of the profit margins and shrinking the size of the computer.

“It makes the machine much more portable,” Block said, pointing out that the Air was not meant to “signal the death of the optical drive.”

The Air does, in Block’s opinion, signal the slow death of another kind of drive critical to computers: The hard disk.

Noting that Apple was not the first to forego the weight and bulk of a spinning hard disk, Block said that new computers are increasingly featuring the faster yet more expensive solid state drive (SSD). The new drives are based on flash memory, similar to the storage cards used by digital cameras.

“The line is really blurring between external and internal storage technology,” Block said, referring to the speed and small size of flash components.

“There may never be a full transition to SSDs as replacements for hard drives,” Kahney said. “Bigger is always better, and hard drives will always be bigger than SSDs. As SSDs get more capacity while coming down in price, so will traditional hard drives – they’ll both follow the same trend lines.”

Cloud Computing

Some sort of local storage will always be around, Block said, despite the popular notion that computers ten years from now will simply be stripped-down web based machines with everything stored online.

“There are some things that the web just is not capable of doing,” he said.

The notion of “cloud computing” was an attractive one to Krazit.

“It’s not hard to imagine the world moving much more broadly toward Internet-delivered content, whether that’s through WI-FI, cellular modems like on the iPhone, or farther-out things like WiMax,” he said.

Krazit listed issues with broadband speeds, privacy concerns and remote data storage business models when predicting the future of day-to-day data usage.

“Apple did away with the floppy in 1998, but we’re still using physical media a decade later,” Krazit said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re still using physical media of one form or another in another decade.”

Krazit commented that the short shelf life of discs is one reason why consumers are losing interest.

“Optical discs are becoming obsolete – or at least, less necessary,” Kahney said. “More and more people are getting music online, especially teenagers. The same is true of movies. Why does the MacBook Air need a DVD drive, when customers can order movies from iTunes?”

Kahney said that more and more computers will rely on an Internet connection for acquiring and playing music, movies and software.

“Look at the iPhone, it doesn’t have an optical drive, yet it can play music and movies that stream right off the Internet or are loaded by a host computer,” he said.

The transition to a disc-independent society will take five to ten years, Kahney said. He pointed to Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, who recently announced that the company is planning to move complex programs like Photoshop and After Effects to an Internet platform within a decade. Kahney stated that the world may never fully abandon the disc.

Block said that he thought Apple made quite a few mistakes when it released the MacBook Air but that early reports indicated the svelte laptop had been selling out. He said it was an odd move for Apple not to include an external disc drive in the box but instead charge $99 for one separately.

“Apple is not getting rid of the disc drive on the rest of its Macs anytime soon,” Krazit said. “With this move they can judge how people react to the lack of the disc drive and plan accordingly if it takes off as a trend.”

Block agreed.

“They’re kind of shifting it out of view but it’s still behind the curtain,” he said.