You can see some of these on "deramp"'s videos (he is selling Altair clones, but even so the videos are great demos).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv5b1Xowxdk
The next upgrade to this is something like the AC-30 for SWTPC. It does exactly the same thing, except uses cassette tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLvfUJd5PjQ
Then came disk drives, but no DOS. Instead they use disk the same way you used the cassette:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdCnj8iL1hI
It was up to you to remember which track your file was on..
Next step: file names, but no automatic space management:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4xmZwcM52w
You write files sequentially to the disk, and you can only write to the end. When you delete there are holes. You can run a defrag program to recover the space.
This stuff was all just before my time, but there were vestiges of it in later operating systems in the early 80s.