NFO

NFO is an abbreviation of INFO which is an abbreviation for INFORMATION. In Microsoft Windows, a file with a *.NFO extension is opened with System Information (a program).

Commonly, files with the *.NFO extension are not designed to be opened with System Information, but with a text editor or specially designed NFO viewers. These files are usually associated with software cracks/patches where the credits and information is stored. Usually, these files, once viewed with a text editor, have a large ASCII art logo at the top and information about the software crack/patch following the logo. (More often than not the files use ANSI characters rather than plain ASCII to enable them to be viewed on a wide range of computers, so viewing them in some editors results in the file looking peculiar.)

This breed of NFO file is loosely related to the FILE_ID.DIZ file found in many ZIP archives which was introduced to provide a standard way of automatically finding descriptions of uploaded files without someone having to actually have a look. No-one is entirely sure where or why NFO files originated, but the most likely answer is that they first cropped up on the *.binaries usenet newsgroups. (The extension NFO was probably chosen because INF was already taken.)