You know, I was doing a bit of a digital spring
clean the other day, clearing off an old hard
drive that I probably haven't touched in, I don't
know, five or six years. And I stumbled into
this old software folder. I honestly couldn't
even remember what the program did. But before
I could click on anything or even try to figure
out the file structure, I saw it. You know, that
one file sitting right at the top of the list,
just screaming at me in all capital letters.
Let me guess. R -E -A -D -M -E. That's the one.
Read me. Not instructions, not guide, just a
command. Read me. It feels so aggressive, doesn't
it? It is imperative. It's loud. Like the developer
is reaching through the screen and grabbing you
by the shoulders? And let's be honest, it's a
file that everyone sees, but... If we're being
real, most people just completely ignore. Oh,
absolutely. Oh, yeah. I'm so guilty of it. I
usually just double click the application icon
and hope for the best. If it breaks, then maybe
I'll go look at it. Right. It's the last resort.
But that moment got me thinking, why is it there?
Why is it shouting? And how has this specific
file survived from the days of massive mainframes
all the way to, you know, the modern web? Well,
it's about time someone stopped to ask. So today
on The Deep Dive, we are stopping to actually
read the RE -ED EME. It's funny you mention ignoring
it because that file is, I mean, it's the cornerstone
of software documentation. It's the Rosetta Stone
for understanding what you just downloaded. And
we're going to unpack its history. And based
on the research we pulled together, mostly from
a really comprehensive Wikipedia breakdown, this
story is. Well, it's wild. It involves Lewis
Carroll, stacks of punch cards from the 70s,
and the entire open source web. It really is
a journey through computing history, just disguised
as a simple text file. Okay, so let's start with
a mission statement. If I'm a developer in 1975
or 2025, why am I creating this file? What is
it actually for? At its most basic, the ReADME
is an orientation device. Think of it like walking
into a massive dark warehouse. You don't know
where the light switch is. You don't know where
the exit is. And you don't know if there are
holes in the floor. Exactly. The ReADME is the
sign right at the entrance that hands you a flashlight
and a map. It's the you are here sign for a directory.
So it tells you what the software is, what all
the other files are for, and crucially, what
not to touch so you don't break everything. Precisely.
And there's a kind of golden rule that goes with
it. Oh, what's that? It's the rule of thumb that
every sysadmin knows by heart. If you are unfamiliar
with the directory, you read this file before
you run anything else. It's not a suggestion.
It's a failsafe. Which brings us back to the
name REHAD in all caps. Yeah. Is it? Just frustration
is the developer basically saying, I know you're
going to ignore this, so I'm just going to yell
at you. It feels emotional, right? But it's actually
purely technical. It's a hack. A hack. A really
clever one. To understand why it screams, you
have to go back to the early days of Unix systems.
Okay, set the scene. So imagine a terminal screen.
No mouse, no icons, just lines of text. In those
early Unix environments, file names were pretty
much all lowercase. Right, main .c, config .sus,
that kind of thing. Exactly. It was just the
culture. Everything was lowercase to save keystrokes.
Now... Computers sort files based on something
called ASCII order. The character codes. Yeah.
And in the ASCII table, capital letters are sorted
before lowercase letters. Oh, I think I see where
this is going. It's about the sort order. You
nailed it. If you named your file, read me in
lowercase, it would just get buried in the middle
of the list, lost in the noise. But if you name
it, read me in all caps. The system is forced
to float it right to the very top of the directory
listing. Yep. That is such a brilliant, low -tech
UI hack. They were capitalizing for visibility,
not for emphasis. It's ingenuity born of limitation.
They didn't have a pin -to -top feature, so they
used the alphabet itself. And that convention
was so effective that it just stuck. And we still
see variations, right? Like readme .txt or, more
often now, readme .chmd. Sure, for plain text
or for markdown. But that core idea, the capitalized
name, has survived for 50 years. Speaking of
50 years, I want to get into the origins. Because
when I was reading through the material, I expected
the history to start with, I don't know, MS -DOS.
But it goes back way, way further. And it gets
surprisingly literary. This is my favorite part.
The source cites the New Hackers Dictionary,
which is basically the folklore bible for computer
science. Okay. And when you ask the old school
hackers where the Read Me convention comes from,
they don't talk about sorting algorithms first.
They talk about Alice's adventures in Wonderland.
Wait, what? Lewis Carroll? The very same. Think
about when Alice falls down the rabbit hole.
She finds a little cake and a bottle. What's
written on them? Eat me and drink me. Exactly.
Simple direct imperatives written on an object
that tell you exactly how to interact with it.
Early hackers loved that playful, direct instruction.
So it's a little literary inside joke. Here's
the magic potion. Read me to enter this weird
new world. It's that intersection of whimsy and
utility that really defined early hacker culture.
But if we want to move from literature to actual
hardware, we can pinpoint its appearance pretty
specifically. The source mentions a date. November
27th, 1974. Right. This is the PDP -10 era. We're
talking mainframe computers that took up entire
rooms. No screens, just teletypes and blinking
lights. And there's an archive record from a
PDP -10 mainframe from that day. It was a failsafe
tape, a backup tape, with a circuit analysis
program called SPICY. And right there on the
tape, a file called ream .txt. 1974. Wow. So
what was in it? Just good luck. Actually, pretty
similar to today. It described dependencies.
It noted the software required Fortran 10 version
4. It listed memory requirements, about 47K.
47 kilobytes. Which was a massive amount of memory
back then, but the message was the same. Before
you try to load this tape and waste expensive
computer time, make sure your machine can handle
it. It's amazing how the problems stay the same
just with more gigabytes. Yeah. But there's an
even more physical origin story mentioned, right?
Before files on a tape. Yes, the tactile history
we always forget. Before screens, programmers
used punch cards. Stacks and stacks of stiff
paper cards with holes in them. So your program
isn't a file. It's a literal cardboard box with
maybe 2 ,000 cards. If you drop that box, you've
ruined your week. So how did you label it? You
take a piece of paper, attach it to the top of
the deck with a rubber band, and on that top
sheet, you'd print... Readme in huge block letters.
A literal physical readme. Exactly. It had the
instructions, load this deck first, or this is
the data, this is the program. It was the cover
sheet. When we moved to digital files, that physical
cover sheet just became the first file in the
directory. That makes so much sense. And it even
crossed over into the consumer world with the
first Macintosh, right? It did. The early Mac
system software disks included a readme. Which
is important because it shows the convention
jumping from the high -level engineers down to
the average person. It became the way to say,
here's leg -breaking info that didn't make it
into the printed manual. Right, because once
the manual is printed and in the box, you can't
change it. But you can change the file on the
disk at the last second. Exactly, the original
day one patch. Okay, so we know where it came
from. Let's talk about the anatomy. If I open
a readme today, what am I looking at? Is there
like a readme police that enforces the rules?
I wish there were readme police sometimes. But
no, the source says there is a total lack of
formal standardization. It's the Wild West. That
sounds chaotic. It can be. But conventions have
emerged over time, especially from groups like
the GNU Project. A really good readme today usually
has a standard checklist of things. Okay, walk
us through the checklist. What do I need? First,
the manifest. That's just a list of all the files
in the directory. It was crucial in the old days
to check for disk corruption. I have five files.
The list says six. Houston, we have a problem.
Exactly. Next, and most importantly... Instructions.
How to configure, install, and operate it. This
is where most bad readmes fail. They assume you
already know everything. The curse of knowledge.
Then, the legal stuff. Always. Copyright and
licensing. Can I copy this? Can I modify it?
Yeah. In the open source world, if you don't
state the license, no one can legally touch your
code. And then the part no one wants to admit.
The problems. The bugs section. A good readme
lists known issues. It's all about managing expectations.
It tells you, we know this feature is broken,
we're working on it. That's actually reassuring.
If I find a bug and it's listed, I feel like,
okay, they know. If it's not, I assume I broke
it. Right, or that the developer's incompetent.
It builds trust. Now, there is an interesting
nuance here because a readme is often talking
to two different groups of people. Oh, who are
groups? You've got the users and you've got the
developers. For example, a news section is for
the user. It says, now features a new dark mode.
It's high level. And the other one. A change
log. That's for the programmer. It's super detailed.
Fixed memory leak in line 400 of the kernel.
The readme has to serve both. It's talking to
the user, the lawyer, and the developer all at
once. Which is why sometimes one file just isn't
enough. And the read -a -me explodes into what
we can call the extended universe of files. The
extended universe. I like that. Because, yeah,
at a big project, there's a whole family of these
shouting all caps files. You split the burden.
So you get authors, which is just a list of who
wrote the code. You get thanks, which is for
acknowledgments. The credits roll. Pretty much.
Then you have install. If the instructions are
super complex, you'll see copying or license
for the full legal text. I've seen one called
Toto. That's the roadmap. A wish list of planned
changes or features. Okay, there's one file name
I've always found funny and the source mentions
it. Hacking. When I see that, I feel like I'm
about to learn how to break into a bank. I know.
It sounds so nefarious now. But this is where
context is key. In the open source world, hacking
uses the old school MIT definition. It just means
playful, clever programming. So it's not how
to steal passwords. No, not at all. A hacking
file is a guide for contributors. It says, if
you want to modify this crane. if you want to
hack on it, here are the coding standards and
style guides you need to follow. It's an invitation
to collaborate. Precisely. And they're all in
PAPs, all shouting to be seen at the top of the
pile. So we've gone from punch cards to text
files. But the way we get software has changed
so much. We go to GitHub now. How did the readme
survive that shift? This is the plot twist. The
writeme hasn't just survived. It has become maybe
the most important marketing asset a piece of
software has. Marketing. That's a huge leap for
a little text file. Think about it. When you
go to a project's page on GitHub, what's the
first thing you see below the file list? The
description, screenshots, badges, all that. That
is the readme. GitHub automatically finds it
and renders it right there on the front page.
It turns the text file into the project's homepage.
Oh, right. That whole section is just the readme.
That's it. And that changed the game. Suddenly,
the ReadMe wasn't an instruction manual you read
after you downloaded something. It became the
landing page you see before you download. Wow.
That is a huge psychological shift. It goes from
user guide to sales pitch. Exactly. It's the
face of the software now. If a project on GitHub
has a messy or blank ReadMe, people assume the
code is messy. They just click away. And they
can look really nice now. It's not just blocky
text. Right. That's thanks to Markdown, the MD
in ReadMe MD. It lets you add formatting, links,
images. GitHub basically turns it into a rich
web page. So it's still just a simple text file
for the developer, but it looks like a professional
website to the user. And this has brought in
this new idea of community health. Community
health. You mean like, is the project alive or
dead? Pretty much. A good readme, a contributing
file, a code of conduct. They signal that a project
is healthy, active, and welcoming. If they're
missing, it feels abandoned. That evolution is...
Just incredible. From a piece of paper on a stack
of punch cards to the multimedia homepage that
determines the social health of a global software
project. And yet the core function is still the
same. It's about context. It's about fighting
chaos. Let's unpack that a little. Because in
a way, the README is the only thing standing
between the user and total confusion. It is.
Information without context is just noise. A
folder full of files like by86driver .dl is meaningless
unless you know what they do. The code makes
it work, but the README makes it usable. Precisely.
It's the human element in the machine. So we've
traveled from the PDP -10 to the modern web.
We learned the all caps isn't anger, it's just
sorting. And that Lewis Carroll has a surprising
amount of influence on all this. Eat me, drink
me, read me. Simple instructions for complex
worlds. As we close out, I want to leave you
with a thought. We've been talking about software,
but you mentioned the readme provides context
in a chaotic system. It's an operating manual
for the unknown. Right. So here's the question.
In our own lives, in our workplaces, we're constantly
overwhelming people. We drop huge project files
on them. We add them to complex teams and just
expect them to figure it out. We give them the
directory but not the readme. Exactly. We assume
they know the context. So do we need to start
writing readmes for ourselves? ReadmeMD for how
to work with you. That's actually a brilliant
idea. Here are my known bugs. I'm grumpy before
coffee. Here's my changelog. I just learned a
new skill. Here is how to install me into a new
project. A user manual for me. It would solve
so many configuration errors in office communication.
If everyone came with a read of me, we'd probably
misunderstand each other a lot less. Something
to think about the next time you open a folder
and see that file shouting at you. Don't ignore
it. Read it. It's trying to help. It's the most
important file in the folder. Thanks for listening
to the Deep Dive. We'll see you next time.