A really long time ago, man started wanting to store data. He realized that always trying to rely on human memory can have its pitfalls. There had to be a way to augment the human's capacity to remember.  Thus, data storage.  The first attempts at data storage used sun dried clay tablets with characters inscribed in them.  They realized very quickly that this was not entirely efficient.  You didn't have to write much before you couldn't carry it around any more. Pocketbooks^® would have never flown, let alone walked.  Well, it could have walked, but with great difficulty.  But I digress.

The search began for more efficient methods of data storage.  The Egyptians came up with the idea of making paper out of papi--, papy--, river reeds.  Now they could store a lot of information, in funny little characters that no one could read until the Rosetta Stone, in a much smaller amount of space.  Some bright fellow also discovered that writing on tanned animal hide (also known as leather) worked too.  This could be better than those river reeds because it would not crack when folded.  But it was a real bummer when your research paper was finished and due the next day, and your dog thought it would make a very tasty chew toy.

The next great innovation in data storage was paper.  Real paper, not that funny river reed stuff.  This was usually made out of wood pulp.  If it was really nice, it might have some cotton in it.  Somewhere along the line, it was discovered you could clamp one side of a stack of papers together and make what they called a "book."  This enabled you to keep all your data in a very neat collection, and made losing parts of it less probable.  Of course, it made losing all of it more probable.  You pick: bound or loose leaf.

Well, when computers came along, it became obvious very quickly that storage for these machine was needed.  Clay tablets and paper wouldn't work.  Too bulky, to inefficient, and computers can't read.  Not to mention that pieces of the tablet might break off in the drive and damage the computer.  An Iomega Clay-Drive just wouldn't have caught on.  One of the first solutions for data storage, or really, data entry, for computers was punch cards.  These allowed data and programs to be "entered" once, and then read by the computer several times.  This worked, but it was slow, inefficient, and cards wore out, tearing their holes, and losing parts of themselves in the machine, of course necessitating a recount.  Something better was clearly needed.  That something better was magnetic media.