DOS era software sometimes had it in the form of "READ.ME".

Note the assumption that any real user is able to read text files after classifying them as such no matter what their “extension” is. Also seen in countless "ORDER.FRM", "EXAMPLE.001", "EXAMPLE.002", and so on, not to mention all the ".DOC" files which had nothing to do with Microsoft Word.

back then 8+3 was a limitation on filenames.

8 for the "name" and 3 for the extension. ah, the lagacy of bit-counting when hardware was THE limitation on software

README has 6 letters though, so README or README.TXT would have been perfectly OK.

READ.ME just looks cool, same thing as with internet domains.

Edit: I even remember seeing this somewhere as a child and admiring how clever it was (Commander Keen maybe?).

And the capitalization thing in this case is of course also a DOS thing (as opposed to the newer traditions pointed out by another comment.

Tangent: on DOS and Windows, filenames without a file extension suffix were just weird. I mostly expected them to contain binary data :D

> READ.ME just looks cool, same thing as with internet domains.

http://read.me/ I'm not interested, but it definitely looks cool

Out of necessity, ad-hoc metadata formats appeared quite soon.

Say, you're connecting to BBS with A LOT of files. Unless you already know that "SEX459W.ZIP" and "SEX454.ZIP" are Windows and DOS versions of (fictitious) “Super Extractor 4.5”, you'll spend a lot of time figuring it out. People who pay no attention to file categories can also get intrigued without a cause. Therefore, full names and descriptions were stored in sidecar files, and were processed to form complete file listings (to download and study offline). Sometimes operators personally reviewed the software, adding interesting opinions about users who had it on their computers, sometimes those were simple excerpts from release notes.

In some cases, the metadata was automatically appended to archives (as standard comments). Later, in the era of Rich Formats, WinZip even allowed arbitrary HTML in ZIP comments, and automatically loaded them into IE frame instead of regular text box when opening such archive. Obviously, that novelty didn't last long.

You just sparked a memory of FILE_ID.DIZ, a standard file included in zip archives during the BBS era.

Pretty sure the .DIZ stood for “Description In Zip”

Now we have almost the opposite in a lot of situations - software feels like it's holding hardware that's faster than ever back. See the comparison of Windows 2000 vs. Windows 11

Found this web site which feels old, and describes this legend.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/R/README-file.html

In fact, the revision history last shows an update in 2003.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/revision-history.html

> Found this web site which feels old, and describes this legend.

The web site is old, but its merely the current incarnation of something much older: “The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as ‘jargon-1’ or ‘the File’) was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975.”

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/revision-history.html

I didn't know but this is going to be my canon now

Yes that's right. There used to be quite a cult around Alice in Wonderland amongst Computer Scientists. Caroll (or Dodgson as his real name was) was also a mathematician.