Markdown is a novelty. Back then, it would be just README (with no file extension at all).
> In windows there's like a single place where you install all your stuff.
Windows was even worse. Whenever you installed something, parts of it were in a new directory at the root of C:\, and parts of it were dumped in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM together with all the rest that's already there, often overwriting files of the same name (and the names were limited to 8 characters plus the extension, so they were quite opaque) used by other software you had installed earlier (that's the original scenario of what is now called "DLL hell"). On later Windows versions, instead of a new directory at the root of C:\ it was a new directory within "C:\Programs Files" (or is it "C:\PROGRA~1"? Or perhaps "C:\Arquivos de programas" aka "C:\ARQUIV~1"? Or something else?), and instead of C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM it was now C:\Windows\system32, and there's also the "Common files" directory somewhere. And since there's no package manager (actually there is one, but not everything uses it, and it's very complex), you don't know which file came from which software. Oh, and if the program you installed overwrote a "protected" system file, the operating system overwrites the file again with its own copy.