Philips demonstrates the compact disc publicly for the first time.

Koninklijke Philips N.V., simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology and former consumer electronics company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters is still in Eindhoven. The company gained its royal honorary title in 1998.

The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and is capable of holding of uncompressed stereo audio. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc format to reach the market, following the larger LaserDisc (LD). In later years, the technology was adapted for computer data storage as CD-ROM, and subsequently expanded into various writable and multimedia formats. As of 2007, over 200 billion CDs had been sold worldwide.

March 8 is the 67th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar; 298 days remain until the end of the year.