Houses and application of Laser The first application of lasers visible in the daily lives of the general population was the supermarket barcode scanner, introduced in 1974. The laserdisc player, introduced in 1978, was the first successful consumer product to include a laser, but the compact disc player was the first laser-equipped device to become truly common in consumers’ homes, beginning in 1982, followed shortly by laser printers. The first working laser was demonstrated on May 16, 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories. Since then, lasers have become a multi-billion dollar industry. O By far the largest single application of lasers is in optical storage devices such as Compact Disc and DVD players, in which a semiconductor laser less than a millimeter wide scans surface of the disc. 2 The second largest application is fiber- optic communication. Other common applications of lasers are bar code readers, laser printers and laser pointers.