The PIT boss

Remember vinyl records? More specifically, do you remember the way vinyl records skip when they're dusty or scratched? Let me assume you're old enough to recall that annoyance, or perhaps you've experienced that vintage technology more recently. Now think back to when you got your first CD. Small and shiny, packing 74 minutes of music, it seemed magical, even more magical when you noticed that you could treat a disc pretty badly before physical damage affected the way it played. A lot of different kinds of engineering, of course, went into figuring out how to put music on a CD and play it back so reliably. There's hardware, including a laser, optics to focus it, and mechanical systems to move the laser and turn the disc. And there’s software-including pulse-code modulation, which turns regular samples of an analog signal into bits, and error-correcting codes, which make sure those bits don't get corrupted.