ON THE ORIGINS OF DS_STORE

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

.DS_Store, which stands for "Desktop Services Store," was originally created to store metadata like icon positions and folder settings for the Mac OS X Finder. The name was chosen because there were plans to make the Finder backend a public API called Desktop Services. However, due to a bug, .DS_Store files are now excessively created even when users don't change view settings. The Desktop Services API was never fully released.