In the beginning, there were paper documents. Kept in flat files and cabinets and organized rather haphazardly, paper documents offered peace of mind that designers were editing the original file despite the work and effort it took to locate the documents.

Then CAD came along and designers began keeping files on disks (but still inside cabinets). Computerizing the documents, however, soon created a new problem: copies. The fix? Labeling the disk to indicate if it contained the original file.