FILE ID.DIZ

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The correct title of this article is FILE_ID.DIZ. The substitution or omission of an _ is due to technical restrictions.

FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain text file containing a brief content description of the archive in which it is included. It was originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBS).

Bulletin boards commonly accepted uploaded files from their users. The BBS software would prompt the user to supply a description for the uploaded file, but these descriptions were often less than useful. BBS system operators spent many hours going over the upload descriptions correcting and editing the descriptions. The FILE_ID.DIZ inclusion in archives was designed to address this problem.

The meaning of FILE_ID is self-explanatory (file identification). DIZ stands for Description In Zipfile. (ZIP was a common archive type in BBS days and was thus used as a common name for archive formats.)

The FILE_ID.DIZ file was invented by Michael Leavitt, an employee of Clark Development for use on his own large personal PCBoard BBS (The Graphics Connection). He also wrote the original PCBDescribe utility. Its purpose was to easily allow the software authors to describe their work without uploaders having to manually type in a description every time they uploaded a file to a BBS.

Clark Development and the Association of Shareware Professionals supported the idea of this becoming a standard for file descriptions. Clark rewrote the PCBDescribe program and included it with their PCBoard BBS software. The ASP urged their members to use this description file format in their distributions. Mr. Leavitt released the file specification and his PCBDescribe program source code to the public domain and urged other BBS software companies to support the DIZ file.

Although dial-up BBSes are no longer in general use, the DIZ file inclusion is still being added to distribution files. It is hoped that internet software developers will make use of this file inclusion to automatically generate file descriptions for their directories.

Traditionally, FILE_ID.DIZ's should be "up to 10 lines of text, each line being no more than 45 characters long." according to the specification v1.9 – this restriction however is rarely used nowadays.

[edit] Observation about the .diz extension

When written in lowercase, "file_id.diz", the DIZ extension appears as .zip would, if it were turned upside down. Given this, it's possible that the "description in zipfile" acronym is really a backcronym.