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