Thank you for creating it! Is there some article or something which talks about the original project or motivation for the DVI format? If DEK implemented it as part of TeX in 1982, what was DVI being used for before that?
(For those unfamiliar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format)
Well, imagine you're an unaccomplished grad student, and you're going to tell Prof. Donald Knuth that he's wrong-headed, that his approach wouldn't scale, and that the right thing to do instead is to have a simple, intermediate format, so that nobody would have to muck around in TeX's internals to get a new output device going. Quite the rush when he gave the go-ahead.
So, the first DVI format was purpose-built for proto-TeX (and underwent a revamp for the final cut, just like everything else). It's really just a slightly compressed form of display-list (move to x,y; put down character c in font f; move; put down a rule; done with page) and nothing to write home about. While it was important in the early days to help us and others to get various devices going, and allow for Tom Rokicki's fabulous(ly important) DVI-to-PostScript program, given the ubiquity of PDF today, it's appropriate that we've come full circle, and PDF output is built into most TeXs that people now use, leaving DVI mostly a historical footnote.