That is what the OP (and some others in this thread, I think, including me) are assuming. That’s what he’s talking about in his fourth paragraph.
Yeah, something like that is the general thrust of what I’m thinking it may be.
48 bytes suggests that it’s the size of a sector on the disk. Alone, it’s practically useless.
What filesystem yields 48-byte sectors? Even a 360 KB floppy disk was usually formatted to FAT-12 with 512-byte sectors, 2 per cluster.
If the OP had posted his or her huge file, I bet someone here would have decoded it by now.
Hmmm… Windows 3 (pretty much the first popular version) didn’t appear IIRC until 1990. The 486 only came out in 1989 and it was f’n expensive at the time. Before that, a computer without a mouse was pretty much a given, I think. Anti-virus, movie maker, etc. - way too recent. You would be lucky to have arcnet in 1989. If it’s not a CHKDSK remnant, odds are it’s something created by an obscure program using their own (non-standard) extensions.
Also note that (IIRC) floppies originally had a limit of 255 (or was it 512?) files per disk/directory, so the creation of multiple tiny files was not a usual tactic.
Do you think the name stood for “MOstly USELESs”?
There was a theory advanced in this thread that it could be a WordPerfect checkpoint file. ftg might tell us what those look like.
ETA this is a good example of why you should store your important documents in some human-readable format if you want to be absolutely sure they will be readable when you need them a few decades from now.
ETA2: some people and organisations seem to be using PDF/A. We’ll have to wait and see how it all goes.
I think everything back then were 8 bit so 0-255 is all it can handle.
In fact, with expanding and cheaper storage options, perhaps the opposite - more issues a bit different from current OP - “I created the file, what the heck for?” Someday I’ll have to dig through what I have stored here, there and everywhere - “Copy of GRUMPY” which was the hard drive contents from my 486 machine… Do I still have the memo my boss wrote in 1993 which ended up on the disc of the computer they basically trashed two years later as thoroughly obsolete?
Instead of lost data we’ll be drowning in obsolete and uncatalogued data.
As an example, every so often I run WINDIRSTAT on a client’s computer to find “why do you still have a snapshot of the accounting database from 2008?” and invariably the answer is, it was a safety backup at the time and forgotten, should have been deleted - but in the era of terabyte drives, a hundred megabytes is forgotten and copied across during wholesale migrations over the years.