After roughly a year of joint meetings between Sony and Philips engineers, the two companies published the "Red Book" standard on September 19, 1980 — the technical specification that would define exactly how the Compact Disc stored and played back audio, including the now-familiar 16-bit, 44.1kHz digital format. It was a genuinely collaborative effort: Sony pushed for 16-bit resolution and a data-correction scheme it had developed, while Philips brought its optical disc manufacturing expertise, and the two sides compromised on details like playback length. This is the year the CD stopped being a rough concept and became an actual engineering blueprint that hardware could be built from.
1980 also saw the Walkman reach the American market for the first time, following its 1979 Japanese debut, extending the personal-stereo trend that would keep growing through the decade.