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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.

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/bc6531...

I still involuntarily expect GitHub to show a description of each file instead of the last commit message.

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.