I remember those as far back as filesystems were 8.3 all caps, so D would not rotate to P though.

I think the way it was conceived is orthogonal to the way it is encoded or displayed.

I have seen thousands and thousands of those files and until now it never clicked that you could kinda rotate 180° that. Thank you!

i just thought it was "this" shortened to DOS standards.

Same, and still makes the most sense to me.

"Description In Zip" has the typical clunkiness of a backronym and the 180° theory suffers from the fact that filenames (as lloeki rightfully pointed out) were usually presented in all uppercase (even when lowercase was available) in that era.

Phonetically shortening stuff on the other hand was almost a requirement in the scene, even if you had the space.

EDIT: Thinking about it "identify this" is well in line with "read me".

Singular of "deez"