[HN Gopher] FILE_ID.DIZ Description (1994)
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FILE_ID.DIZ Description (1994)
Author : Lammy
Score : 240 points
Date : 2024-05-26 20:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pcmicro.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pcmicro.com)
| quercusa wrote:
| It has been many years since I've seen a Compuserve ID.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > (The extension of "DIZ" actually stands for "Description In
| Zip")
|
| Ah, finally, another puzzlement from my childhood explained.
| fullstop wrote:
| As a kid, I always assumed that it was "description" but in
| some other language which I was unfamiliar with.
| spitfire wrote:
| Leetspeak. As a kid, you should have known leetspeak.
| bytearray wrote:
| Um, I think you mean 1337
| Scotrix wrote:
| not to be mistaken with 31337 ;-)
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Oh, hi there! ;^)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes, but which color book was this term first used? Then
| we'll establish how l337 you are or are not
| fragmede wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U9MI0u2VIE
|
| https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/10997/
| wer...
|
| great scene.
| herodoturtle wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| physical 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 wrote:
| I think .diz preceeded leetspeak by a couple of years.
| euroderf wrote:
| FWIW, leetspeak is just a calligraphic flourish away from
| feetspeak.
| lloeki wrote:
| I assumed it was short for "distribution", stylised.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I thought it was leetspeak for "this", so FILE_ID.DIZ was
| "file to identify this"
| BennyH26 wrote:
| Same here. This is the first thing I looked up when I saw the
| article.
| drbig wrote:
| Indeed!
| cdchn wrote:
| I was under the impression the DIZ was because it first
| appeared on a BBS called DiZZYboard iirc
| foresto wrote:
| I assumed it was because "diz" was "zip" rotated 180deg.
|
| "Description In Zip" seems like it could be a backronym.
| lloeki wrote:
| I remember those as far back as filesystems were 8.3 all
| caps, so D would not rotate to P though.
| foresto wrote:
| I think the way it was conceived is orthogonal to the way
| it is encoded or displayed.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I have seen thousands and thousands of those files and until
| now it never clicked that you could kinda rotate 180deg that.
| Thank you!
| wengo314 wrote:
| i just thought it was "this" shortened to DOS standards.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Same, and still makes the most sense to me.
|
| _" Description In Zip"_ has the typical clunkiness of a
| backronym and the 180deg 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 wrote:
| Singular of "deez"
| ale42 wrote:
| Lol, 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 wrote:
| Still actively used for releases in the demoscene.
| bluedino wrote:
| Was there a standard filename for the little ANSI art file?
|
| Remember reading this text file so long ago
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| .NFO[0] files?
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nfo
| bluedino wrote:
| That is what I was thinking of
| arglebargle123 wrote:
| ANSI art was usually separate IIRC, nfos had ASCII art
| headers but I don't remember ever seeing color in them
| cdchn wrote:
| A lot of these had ASCII art in them.
| caseyf wrote:
| Sometimes there'd be a bunch because BBSes the zip passed
| through would add an nfo or .bbs
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Pedantic 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 wrote:
| Perhaps the eminently useful <PLAINTEXT> tag hadn't been
| invented in 1994 :-)
| unwind wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| HTML1.1, 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I did. Before the internet, I read just about everything I
| could find - there might valuable information in it !
| Sharlin wrote:
| Well, 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.
| LVB wrote:
| I also recall DESCRIPT.ION files back in the day.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| I thought only 4DOS/DR-DOS used that?
| LVB wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Some 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/
|
| [1] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
|
| [2] https://codeberg.org/badsector/PetraEngine/src/commit/bc6
| 531...
| layer8 wrote:
| I still involuntarily expect GitHub to show a description
| of each file instead of the last commit message.
| jzzskijj wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| if 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 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Essentially 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 wrote:
| lots and LOTS of these and more can be enjoyed at
| https://defacto2.net/home
|
| along with much more retro underground history.
| PostOnce wrote:
| On second thought and too late to edit, a direct link to a
| relevant search
| https://defacto2.net/search/result?search=all&query=file_id....
|
| There are also zip files with collections of .diz files, etc
| jolmg wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Pcmicro was a noted RemoteAccess BBS support site back in the BBS
| heyday http://pcmicro.com/ra/
| jzzskijj wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| When "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 wrote:
| This stuff is still happening even today :-)
|
| http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=107478 for
| example this 2024 release, if you scroll to the end of the
| page.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Hehe. Here's a cool FILE_ID.DIZ collection:
| http://www.roysac.com/fileid_col.html
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Real nice ascii art collection!
| alkonaut wrote:
| I 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.
| jzzskijj wrote:
| Huh! Which system you were using? Notepad in Windows or
| Linux?
| cesarb wrote:
| I would guess MS-DOS. Back then, there was no UTF-8, and
| the character encoding depended on your language. People
| using English normally were using CP437
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP437), while people using
| other languages would be using something like CP850
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP850). Take a look at the
| encoding tables in these two articles, and notice that
| CP437 has lots of line and box drawing characters in the
| high half, while CP850 replaces many of them with accented
| letters.
|
| If the file was written on a system using CP437, and used
| these line/box drawing characters, then someone on a system
| using CP850 would see random letters where the author
| intended fancy boxes around their text.
|
| (This was due to a limitation of the text modes used to run
| MS-DOS: each character on the 80x25 fixed-size grid shown
| on the screen was described in memory by a single byte
| which was a index into the font table, plus another byte
| for attributes like color and intensity. That means there
| could be at most 256 distinct characters, and no way to
| combine separate characters into one. To add all the
| accented letters necessary for many languages, something
| had to be removed; and what was removed were the less
| important line and box drawing characters. That is very
| different from the graphical modes common nowadays, which
| store the color of each pixel separately in memory, and
| allow infinite variation on the character shapes.)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Dos and later Windows. Unsure which code pages were used
| but this was in Sweden.
| jzzskijj wrote:
| > Unsure which code pages were used but this was in
| Sweden.
|
| Interesting. Every PC I ever used in Finland (home,
| school, friend's, etc.) were always using
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437 and I would
| have assumed every PC in Sweden did too. Maybe your did
| have cp850 or something uncommon.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Bah.. 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 wrote:
| I'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."
| rob74 wrote:
| Then 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| What I remember is a title ascii screen (yellow letters
| against a red background or something the like) stating 'if
| you copy Doom, you will go to hell'. I'm pretty sure I got a
| copy of the complete game. I guess a lot of people will be
| going to hell.
| jzzskijj wrote:
| If you played Doom, you were already in Hell.
| sph wrote:
| The original .DS_Store
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Didn'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 wrote:
| i love the textured background , just needs some work-in-
| progress.gif
| jinglemansweep wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Here 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&qfield...
| ruslan wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > A program which will do anything for anybody...$15.00
|
| Such a bargain!
| Lammy wrote:
| I 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.
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(page generated 2024-05-27 23:01 UTC)