As a historian by training, I try to look at things in chronological order. So I’ll start with what happened first chronologically, even though it wasn’t the first point to come to light. In July 2004, a young software engineer named David Braginsky wrote in his blog that he “became a techlead of project Platypus at Google,” among many other things happening in his life. Sadly, his next update wasn't for another year, and only mentioned that he “really wants to focus on work.” There are no entries newer than August 2005 and no hints as to what project Platypus actually is.

In September 2005, Garett Rogers posted some speculation in his blog about a new project of Google’s called GDrive. After revealing that Google owns the gbrowser.com domain, he suggests that it could stand for “file browser.” Then he figures that “if google was smart, they would provide some sort of online storage medium that can be accessed from anywhere… a similar 3rd party application had been developed called ‘GDrive’ which utilized GMail as it's storage. This application has suspiciously been discontinued.” After doing a little digging, Rogers discovered that the gdrive.com domain is owned by the same parties who own the gbrowser.com domain, which leads back to Google. He saw that as convincing evidence that Google is working on a GDrive.

In December 2005, Google bought Writely.com, an online word processor that lets you store your documents securely online. It was by no means the first service that Google made available to its users that allowed them to store content online, nor would it be the last; Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Spreadsheet, Blogger, Google Base, and Picasa, just to name a few, allow users to store and share different kinds of content in a variety of ways. But there’s nothing to tie it all together into one drive, or at least not yet.