Happy Birthday Dear MP3……….

The nemesis of the music industry, the MP3, turned 10 years old yesterday. This file format which instigated the birth of the peer to peer file sharing network was named on the 14th of July, 1995 by researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. The researchers agreed to use MP3 as the file extension for their new audio coding technology following an internal poll. (MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer 3)

In the picture: The audio team 1987 (from left): Harald Popp, Stefan Krägeloh, Hartmut Schott, Bernhard Grill, Heinz Gerhäuser, Ernst Eberlein, Karlheinz Brandenburg and Thomas Sporer. (Photo: Kurt Fuchs / Fraunhofer IIS)

Here is the letter announcing the decision to use the file extension (it is translated from German of course)
"Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 12:29:49 +0200
Subject: Layer3 file extension: .mp3
Hi all, this is the overwhelming result of our poll:
everyone voted for .mp3 as extension for ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3!
As a consequence, everyone please mind that for WWW pages, shareware, demos, and so on, the .bit extension is not to be used anymore. There is a reason for that, believe me
:-) Jürgen Zeller"