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FILE_ID.DIZ Description (1994)
- quercusa 2y agoIt has been many years since I've seen a Compuserve ID.
- Joker_vD 2y ago> (The extension of "DIZ" actually stands for "Description In Zip") Ah, finally, another puzzlement from my childhood explained.
- fullstop 2y agoAs a kid, I always assumed that it was "description" but in some other language which I was unfamiliar with.
- spitfire 2y agoLeetspeak. As a kid, you should have known leetspeak.
- bytearray 2y agoUm, I think you mean 1337
- Scotrix 2y agonot to be mistaken with 31337 ;-)
- 31337Logic 2y agoOh, hi there! ;^)
- dylan604 2y agoYes, but which color book was this term first used? Then we'll establish how l337 you are or are not
- fragmede 2y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10997/were-any-of-the-books-mentioned-in-this-scene-from-the-movie-hackers-real https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10997/wer... great scene.
- herodoturtle 2y agoI’m the biggest fan of Hackers but that scene has always irked me. They’re all so impressed with Dade’s knowledge yet he simply appears to be reading the cover title of each book as it gets passed. Someone please give me a meta explanation that justifies this so that my inner fanboy can sleep better at night. I’ve probably watched Hackers 100s of times. Best love story ever.
- doublerabbit 2y agoThe nicknames given to each book is what he's being tested on. "The dragoon book", "That ugly red book that wont sit on the shelf" and so on.
- fragmede 2y agophysical books weren't just given away to anyone who asked back then, so getting a copy of one is an achievement in the first place so the assumption is if you got it, you read it and by reading the title out loud he's saying I know what's in those books, like the anarchist cookbook
- xtracto 2y agoI think .diz preceeded leetspeak by a couple of years.
- euroderf 2y agoFWIW, leetspeak is just a calligraphic flourish away from feetspeak.
- lloeki 2y agoI assumed it was short for "distribution", stylised.
- ahartmetz 2y agoI thought it was leetspeak for "this", so FILE_ID.DIZ was "file to identify this"
- BennyH26 2y agoSame here. This is the first thing I looked up when I saw the article.
- drbig 2y agoIndeed!
- cdchn 2y agoI was under the impression the DIZ was because it first appeared on a BBS called DiZZYboard iirc
- foresto 2y agoI assumed it was because "diz" was "zip" rotated 180°. "Description In Zip" seems like it could be a backronym.
- lloeki 2y agoI remember those as far back as filesystems were 8.3 all caps, so D would not rotate to P though.
- foresto 2y agoI think the way it was conceived is orthogonal to the way it is encoded or displayed.
- b3lvedere 2y agoI have seen thousands and thousands of those files and until now it never clicked that you could kinda rotate 180° that. Thank you!
- wengo314 2y agoi just thought it was "this" shortened to DOS standards.
- weinzierl 2y agoSame, and still makes the most sense to me. "Description In Zip" has the typical clunkiness of a backronym and the 180° theory suffers from the fact that filenames (as lloeki rightfully pointed out) were usually presented in all uppercase (even when lowercase was available) in that era. Phonetically shortening stuff on the other hand was almost a requirement in the scene, even if you had the space. EDIT: Thinking about it "identify this" is well in line with "read me".
- xnx 2y agoSingular of "deez"
- deleted 2y ago
- ale42 2y agoLol, when I was seeing them around as a teenager I was thinking to DIZ as "dizionario" in Italian (dictionary)... of course, had I thought a bit more, I could have figured out that it was probably not Italian.
- dave84 2y agoStill actively used for releases in the demoscene.
- bluedino 2y agoWas there a standard filename for the little ANSI art file? Remember reading this text file so long ago
- colejohnson66 2y ago.NFO[0] files? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo
- bluedino 2y agoThat is what I was thinking of
- arglebargle123 2y agoANSI art was usually separate IIRC, nfos had ASCII art headers but I don't remember ever seeing color in them
- cdchn 2y agoA lot of these had ASCII art in them.
- caseyf 2y agoSometimes there'd be a bunch because BBSes the zip passed through would add an nfo or .bbs
- AdamH12113 2y agoPedantic note: This appears to be a text file that was improperly converted to HTML. The body contains text in angle brackets that is not visible when viewing in a web browser, mainly the <ASP> mark for the Association of Shareware Professionals. You can properly see the original text by viewing the page source.
- rav 2y agoPerhaps the eminently useful <PLAINTEXT> tag hadn't been invented in 1994 :-)
- unwind 2y agoThe file self-describes (in the first line) as being HTML, so not using characters that don't work in HTML seems like a sensible requirement. Strange that nobody noticed and fixed it, earlier. Perhaps browsers of yore (heh, I was there so that sounds strange) did render the elements in question since they were less strict?
- deaddodo 2y agoHTML1.1, HTML2, etc weren't less strict, if anything they were more. They only consumed tags that could be rendered, since there wasn't a concept of a DOM tree or anything like that. They just worked forward rendering as they went. CSS and JavaScript introduced the need for a DOM tree and mutable state, in which case HTML renderers treated HTML docs more like XML descriptor files than SGML.
- csense 2y agoI saw plenty of FILE_ID.DIZ's back in the day. Interesting bit of history to find out more! (Even decades after it's become irrelevant)
- asveikau 2y agoI completely forgot this was a thing, but its existence was etched in my brain. I wasn't aware that anybody read those files. The name would fly by when extracting a zip, but that's it.
- Agingcoder 2y agoI did. Before the internet, I read just about everything I could find - there might valuable information in it !
- Sharlin 2y agoWell, their whole point was to be read and displayed by BBS software (and later by some early download websites I guess) to help users decide what to download in the first place, so they were indeed not expected to be opened by the user after downloading.
- tracker1 2y agoThat's actually a different feature of (PK-)ZIP, but often the same file. It was a command line switch in pkzip to add a file to display when extracting the contents. FILE_ID.DIZ was mostly about auto-importing file descriptions with BBS software. Especially helpful with message networks that included distributed file areas, like FidoNet.
- LVB 2y agoI also recall DESCRIPT.ION files back in the day.
- b3lvedere 2y agoI thought only 4DOS/DR-DOS used that?
- LVB 2y agoIt also was a zip description for a short while, at least among a few large midwest BBS’s, until FILE_ID.DIZ won out.
- badsectoracula 2y agoSome file managers (e.g. Volkov Commander) used that too. Actually still do: Total Commander[0] can use to show a short description for each file. I used it in a game i wrote for an MSDOS game jam a few years ago[1][2] to add some era relevant flavor (and also dirinfo for Norton Commander and clones). [0] https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ [1] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra [2] https://codeberg.org/badsector/PetraEngine/src/commit/bc653125f27487383fa9ba6310dda662c35cf9ec/descript.ion https://codeberg.org/badsector/PetraEngine/src/commit/bc6531...
- layer8 2y agoI still involuntarily expect GitHub to show a description of each file instead of the last commit message.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jzzskijj 2y agoI had a tool, which extracted all FILE_ID.DIZ files from the archives (zip, rar, arj, lha, ...) in the directory and created DESCRIPT.ION files from those DIZ contents for those archives. Using 4DOS was joy when going through archives.
- dataf3l 2y agoif you go look in the source code of the html you can see some <ASP> tags probably not rendered by the browser so in order to READ this document you have to view-source (it doesn't look that different, but it makes more sense).
- kemitchell 2y agoThe whole history of shareware was badly neglected along my path into the industry, as if all those people set sail sometime in the 1990s and were never heard from again. In fact they continued in parallel, and still show very obvious influence in many niches of software. I think that was just hard to see while I was at uni. I can strongly recommend Richard Moss' Shareware Heroes book for those interested in remedial reading, and not just for those devoted to games. If there are any computer history grad students lurking, an integrative history of early software distribution models and industry orgs is still a big, gaping hole in the lit, as far as I know.
- ghaff 2y agoEssentially it was a parallel track in the BBS world. And it ended up dying/morphing into the sort of trial-ware etc. that the "true" shareware movement was largely against. The whole thing just sort of fizzled out as open source was becoming more prominent but, even as someone who was a part of it, it's not totally clear to me how that transition came about. With a few exceptions like Jason Scott's BBS documentary, the non-Unix/Internet history of early personal computing is not very well-covered at all.
- PostOnce 2y agolots and LOTS of these and more can be enjoyed at https://defacto2.net/home https://defacto2.net/home along with much more retro underground history.
- PostOnce 2y agoOn second thought and too late to edit, a direct link to a relevant search https://defacto2.net/search/result?search=all&query=file_id.diz https://defacto2.net/search/result?search=all&query=file_id.... There are also zip files with collections of .diz files, etc
- jolmg 2y ago> A user file (such as README.1ST), which should explain how to use the install utility, what the user should expect during the installation, and any preparation that the user should make prior to the installation. This file might also contain a brief description of your program > might There's times where I find a random codebase and the README talks about how to install it without first giving some idea on what it is. I guess that's not new.
- bananaboy 2y agoPcmicro was a noted RemoteAccess BBS support site back in the BBS heyday http://pcmicro.com/ra/ http://pcmicro.com/ra/
- jzzskijj 2y agoThis made me chuckle: > Please don't be tempted to use fancy graphic or ANSI sequences in the FILE_ID.DIZ file, as most BBS software will not allow this, and will render your FILE_ID.DIZ file useless. Everyone was doing exactly that and even I did something like +hundred artsy file_id.diz headers for the scene groups or my own groups. When "releases" started to be from 5 to 15 disks (packages), many sysops started to clearing the art away from the file lists and just leaving an oneliner of the title visible, like: The Name of The Release Disk: [03/12] Interesting too that as niche as they are today, they are still being made. The last ones I did was in 2015.
- jasonfarnon 2y agoWhen "releases" started to be from 5 to 15 disks I can remember this, scrolling through page after page of the same release since only 3 or 4 big "PWA" or "FLT" logos could fit on a page. I remember more or less the same visual style as graffiti from the era. I had no idea this stuff was still happening in 2015.
- jzzskijj 2y agoThis stuff is still happening even today :-) http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=107478 http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=107478 for example this 2024 release, if you scroll to the end of the page.
- blackhaz 2y agoHehe. Here's a cool FILE_ID.DIZ collection: http://www.roysac.com/fileid_col.html http://www.roysac.com/fileid_col.html
- nuancebydefault 2y agoReal nice ascii art collection!
- alkonaut 2y agoI was adult years old when I realized all those big walls of gibberish I saw in my youth was intended to be elaborate graphics, but my computer had the wrong charset to show them.
- DeathArrow 2y agoIn a world where we increasingly don't own software but we rent it, is hard to imagine that shareware even existed. As a kid I remember playing only first level of Doom, because it was distributed as a shareware and didn't have money to buy the game. I remember saving money and buying computer magazines and then installing all the shareware they had on floppy disks, out of curiosity. For me the discovery process was fascinating.
- thesnide 2y agoBah.. we just don't call it shareware anymore, but freemium. And mission disks are called DLC. Which also work with DRM free content. DRM and renting feels like short term gain to me.
- immibis 2y agoI've bought one mobile app in my life. It was a tower defense game. The first few levels were completely free. After that, the game sends monsters that are too tough to destroy with the towers in the free content of the game. You could pay $2.50 for more towers, $2.50 for more more towers, $2.50 for more levels, $2.50 for something I don't remember, as in-app transactions. I thought two things: "this game is fun enough to be worth $10," and "this is a really stupid way to do shareware."
- thesnide 2y agoThat's not shareware. At least not in the spirit. That's pay to win. Shareware is about more features /content and a clean cut out of them in the free version.
- rob74 2y agoThen you must be misremembering... the shareware version was the first episode, which was around a quarter of the final game. This practice was started by Apogee (who published, amongst others, Wolfenstein 3D) and then continued by id software for Doom and Quake.
- sph 2y agoThe original .DS_Store
- tracker1 2y agoFor what it's worth... echo ".DS_Store\n" >> ~/.gitignore git config --global core.excludesFile "~/.gitignore"
- einpoklum 2y ago> MULTIPLE DISK INFO Wow, that brings back memories. Always worrying that one of the many floppies will have a read error, and there goes the whole application :-(
- bni 2y agoDidn't know these had Shareware origin, always thought it was a Warez thing. These were a hassle when unzipping and you always got the question if you wanted to overwrite or not.
- amias 2y agoi love the textured background , just needs some work-in-progress.gif
- jinglemansweep 2y agoI think some of my old Amos MaxsBBS Doors are still on Aminet archives. Used to love the ASCII art and the cRAZY cASING used in DIZ files.
- Sembiance 2y agoHere is a collection of 1.1 MILLION FILE_ID.DIZ files from back in the day: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=FILE_ID.DIZ&qfields=filename https://discmaster.textfiles.com/search?q=FILE_ID.DIZ&qfield...
- ruslan 2y agoI totally like their example, let me cite it here: ------- MY PROGRAM v1.23 - A program which will do anything for anybody. Will run in only 2k of memory. Can be run from the command line, or installed as a TSR. Completely menu- driven. Version 1.23 reduces the previous 4k memory requirements, and adds an enhanced graphical user interface. Also, MY PROGRAM now contains Windows and DESQview support. Coming soon - an OS/2 version. From Do-It-All Software, Inc. $15.00 Just $15.00 for such a software gem with 2k mem requirements. I would surely pay for an OS/2 version. :)
- Clubber 2y ago> A program which will do anything for anybody...$15.00 Such a bargain!
- Lammy 2y agoI love the burn about OS/2’s lack of software, where a fictional developer has done all of those things including DESQview support of all things but still hasn’t supported OS/2.
- ruslan 2y agoI would love to peek for a moment into parallel Universe where OS/2 took place of nowadays Linux.
- PobedaRossia 2y ago[flagged]
- NuSkooler 2y agoI wrote a article on the history of this stuff a while back you may enjoy: https://l33t.codes/2020/12/10/Retro-standards-part-1-file-descriptors/ https://l33t.codes/2020/12/10/Retro-standards-part-1-file-de...