what was the first company to make the compact disc?

The first compact optical disc prototype was made in 1970 at Philips. More prototypes were made and by 1977 Mitsubishi, Hitachi & Sony also had prototypes. In 1978 Philips proposes a worldwide standard for compact discs and by 1980 Sony Philips and others agree on the current CD standard. In 1982 both Sony and Philips sold CD players commercially.

I got my first CD player in 1985. It was a 5 disc changer by Sharp that set me back $500 but it worked until 2000 when the changer started to jam regularily. I used my first CD-ROM computer drive in 1988 which was connected to a Sun workstation. This CD-ROM was a sub-1x drive meaning it read data at less that 150KB/sec so it could only (slowly) read data; you couldn’t play music on it. I purchased my first CD-ROM drive for my computer in 1992. It was a double-speed (300 KB/sec) SCSI drive. Back then most of the software still came on floppy disks though. My CDROM drive paid for itself in 1993 when I was able to install Windows NT 3.1 off of a CD instead a box full of floppies.