How it got started
I hadn't played D&D since the early 80's. In May of 2009, I was given a 2006 D&D Basic Game. I really liked the miniatures & dungeon tiles that came with the game. I played the game with my family & we all enjoyed it, so I decided to buy the latest books and start playing. Little did I know how much D&D had changed since those early days! The first problem was keeping track of conditions during combat. I did some searching and found several great ideas using either miniatures or tokens. I really liked the idea of using miniatures, but at this point all I had were the ones that came with the Basic Game. So, I went with tokens. First it was just paper tokens, then came the wood disks & washers. But the more we played, it wasn't enough to just have "bloodied" & "marked". So I tried to come up with something on my own. I liked the weight of the washers, but they weren't always easy to pick up. Since I had access to a lathe, I combined the weight of the washer with the thickness of the wooden disk and made a 1" diameter aluminum token.
I'd read that players were using soda cap rings. This still limited me to 2 colors.
Next I thought of using colored pins, but this was too much work & limited colors.
I tried the plastic squares in different colors, but it wasn't easy to move around.
Now the idea of a post of some sort. First it was a cap screw with the head cut off. The problem with this was that small diameter cap screws, that are long enough to hold several beads, were hard to find. To get a longer screw, you have to go with a larger diameter. This made the beads fit too tight.
Nails would work better, but how to put them in aluminum. So I switched to plastic.
This did work, but I liked the aluminum.