It's not universal. It's specific to the IBM PC platform. I imagine it was invented by IBM back in the early 80s, but I could be wrong. Other architectures use different methods.

Basically, the IBM PC partition table is defined to be on the first sector on the hard disk as part of the MBR (Master Boot Record) and it consists of four 16-byte records, each defining a partition. There can be no more than four primary partitions in this architecture. There are a number of ways "sub-partitions" can be defined, but they are all defined within the space of the primary partition itself.

Wikipedia has an entry on the IBM MBR and partition table scheme.