Computing and human civilisation are useless without data storage. States and cultures have relied on it for more than 5,000 years, but recently we've become rather good at making it fast, capacious and small. Here's a canter through the history of one of our most enduring technologies.
Cuneiform tablet
The first systematic data storage system was the cuneiform writing system, which kicked off in around 3400BCE. Although it evolved into a complete written language, it started off as a way to count and categorise agricultural production and, inevitably, to calculate taxes.
Made by pressing a stylus into a clay tablet, the writing could be rubbed out subsequently — or the tablet could be baked for more permanent storage.
Thousands of legible tablets and other inscriptions survive, an impressive feat that we're unlikely to duplicate with modern technology. However, storage capacity is limited, with a single mobile phone-sized tablet maxing out at around 500 bytes.
Photo credit: Library of Congress
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Don't forget Magnetic Bubble memory invented by Bell Labs in the late sixties. It was a form of non-volatile memory. At one time, it was going to become the storage unit in every computer but falling hard drive prices destroyed its commercial potential.
Also the chinese and anyone with non Latin /greek characters could not adopt the press, i.e. chinese, arabic, japanese, in fact only the europeans and russians were the major civilisations to use printed books until the 19th century, prior to which the renaissance happened and enlightenment.
This is quite wrong in all respects.
The history of printing is complex and China and other parts of Asia were the first to print on paper and even developed movable type.
See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing
Also the Russians are actually Europeans... Since Europe is defined as that part of Eurasia to the West of the Ural mountains. That area (West of the Ural Mountains) in the far east of Europe is where ethnic Russians first emerged and where most of them still live to this day, it is called Russia. If you talk about the modern Russian federation or the old Russian Empire or Soviet Russia then you have to include Siberia and parts of Central Asia