title: Can you explain the concept of streams?
body: <p>I understand that a stream is a representation of a sequence of bytes.  Each stream provides means for reading and writing bytes to its given backing store.  But what is the point of the stream?  Why isn't the backing store itself what we interact with?  </p>
  
  <p>For whatever reason this concept just isn't clicking for me.  I've read a bunch of articles, but I think I need an analogy or something.</p>