The case of the DVD has plagued history for centuries. Historians have lost countless hours of sleep, politicians have rasped their throats til raw, lawyers have burned numerous neurons, all trying to crack the mystery of the DVD. What did it do? How did it end? Wherever did it come from, anyway?

The world used to be at peace. That is, until 1996, the year the first DVDs emerged, when the earth awoke in a fiery eruption of fury. With great fanfare, research commenced on the DVD. Virtually all recent research has focused on 1996 and its surrounding years. Scientists have stumbled to and fro, seemingly always on the brink of tantalizing discovery, scraping and digging for yet another ambiguous piece of the endless puzzle. The enthusiasm has been contagious, the ambition admirable. But the problem with all the research—critical. Unknown to the hoary historians, persistent polititians, laudable lawyers, and sublime scientists, the first DVD did not emerge in 1996, but over a decade earlier.

I got my first DVD when my oldest brother bought me Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It wasn't one of the first DVDs, for DVDs had entered mainstream usage several years earlier. It wasn't even the first DVD for me, for I already had a couple DVDs, in the form of my college email names: d_v_d@uclink and dvd@ocf. Even if I discount email addresses as true DVDs, the Fellowship wasn't a first, but a first-second-third-fourth, the entire 4-disc extended edition collector's set. None of this really mattered, though, for I liked the discs very much and hardly thought about their not being my first. To me, I was my own first DVD, and now I had both electronic and hard evidence to prove it.

Early Years

Little is known about the early years of "dvd." In fact, people never referred to me by that nickname, probably because DVDs had barely come into the minds of even their developers. The kid later to be known as "dvd," best known for wandering aimlessly during high school, literally making up to a dozen laps around his school's interior courtyard at lunch with his friend and future roommate, the legendary Paco Pao, lead a rather boring and benign life. I barely knew that I existed, and that was the beauty of the period. As the saying goes, "Know Not Thyself," for then one can do what's Right and Good simply because they are, regardless of what they might do for one's reputation. Well, to "Know Thyself" also has some benefits, which I gleaned over the years but still hope to balance with a healthy lack of self-awareness.

First DVD

I first became acquainted with the "dvd" while picking my college email address. Filling out an online application, I came across a small but significant field asking for the official name that I would carry for all major online transactions during my college career. As I deliberated at my computer with my brother close at hand, I tried out straightforward, bland derivatives of my legal name, such as "dyoung" or "dmy". To my relief, none of them worked, for my name is not particularly unusual. Eventually my brother dawned upon an ingenious contraction. How about using my first name alone? Or even less than that? Following normal abbreviation conventions, we simply eliminated the vowels from my first name and ended up with something not only pronoucible, but also intelligible as a distinct word, and an electronic one at that. "dvd", I typed. To my dismay, someone or something had already taken that enviably short name.

Again, my brother came to the rescue. If we took out letters, might we not show where we took them from? "d_v_d" for david, I typed, and so it was. The DVD case cracked open for the first time. I had finally seen the light, and now I could emerge as "DVD." I had no idea what it meant to be dvd, but I liked it, so much in fact that I joined the Open Computing Facility at my campus with its wider availability of account names so that I could attain the undistracted, pure form of "dvd" alone.

The Case at Hand

My later years, traced in the following pages, crack wide open the case of the DVD. The history unveils the mystery and follows the boom of DVDs in both the recording industry and my own life. Hopefully we won't find too many parallels, for one can at least hope to be more than a record, even one of the magnitude and sophistication of the digital video disc. DVDs will one day go by the wayside, but hopefully this dvd will leave a longer lasting legacy, however obscure or diffuse. For now, I'll just try to live life, and I'll leave the judgment of the Case of the DVD to a future and higher judge.