A pit on a CD is not dark — it is a quarter of a wavelength deep, so the light bouncing off it cancels the light beside it. Everything else about the format is built on that one piece of interference.
The Compact Disc was a joint Sony and Philips standard, settled in 1981, and it did something no format had managed before: it replaced an entrenched medium almost completely, in about a decade, without a format war.
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