file separator - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

Back in the '90s, under MS-DOS, files in a directory would sometimes appear in an apparently* (* due to the vagaries of the FAT filesystem type, succeeded by NTFS) haphazard sequence unless specifically ordered by the /o parameter to display alphabetically (/on), by size (/os), by age (/od), etc. This was a problem for curators of underground artpacks, because sometimes we wanted to manually curate the sequence of an artpack's constituent files according to our capricious whims (eg. forcing them to display by file type, so the ANSI art files wouldn't get high resolution graphics files muddled up in between them -- so that dir would display a list of all the files of one type, alphabetically by creator initials, then all the files of another type, also alphabetically by creator initials, and so forth down the line. Maybe at the very end would be an empty file named something like "BYE.!!!" just to ice the cake.

How to force the display of the files in a certain sequence? To greater or lesser extent, they were displayed in sequence of file creation in the FAT system, and if you were bloody-minded enough you could manually create copies of files in the desired sequence, but there were easier techniques.

When archiving an artpack, it was possible to specify to eg. PKZIP via command-line switches in what order you'd like the files added to the zipfile, and consequently in what order they would be extracted from the archive by the end user. (II can't speak for all artpack curators, but I would first generate a textfile containing all of the filenames of desired files, order them in the textfile according to my whims, and then specify to PKZIP to archive them in the sequence stipulated in that textfile.) It's an aspect to artpack preparation that we left behind in the '90s and that is nontrivial to bring back into effect, but no one has really missed it.

One thing we stopped doing however is including file separators, little bits of file system ornamentation that were part of the artpack's presentation in an MS-DOS directory, but not explicitly containing computer art themselves. They would be named something like ANSI.!!! ASCII.!!! LIT.!!! VGA.!!! and so forth -- if you were feeling fancy you could even encode uncoloured ANSI characters into the filenames themselves -- each one displaying at the beginning of its' department's rolls (or if feeling excessively fancy, also at the end of each department's rolls), and would typically be a basically empty file, maybe a text file containing only a single space. But really they could contain anything -- greetz and hidden messages, favorite song lyrics, whatever. Sometimes they would be nuggets of UseNet humour, or entire FAQs pressed into duty like doorstops. I got into trouble at one point using the script to Pulp Fiction as a file separator, and Mist Classic members complained that I was abusing file separators to make the artpack look like it contained more (art) (as weighed by bytes) than it actually did.