On a Thursday morning almost 30 years in the past at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, a software program developer was checking code for a dialog field he was engaged on. The field was solely purported to be short-term so he didn't fear it was quite simple. Besides nobody ever thought to vary it – and it's nonetheless the identical to this present day in Home windows 11.
Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, informed the attention-grabbing story of how the Format Drive dialog was created all these years in the past in a post on X in weekend.
“We have been porting the thousands and thousands of traces of code from the Home windows 95 consumer interface to NT, and Formatting was simply a kind of areas the place Home windows NT was completely different sufficient from Home windows 95 that we needed to give you a customized consumer interface,” says Plummer . . “I took out a bit of paper and wrote down all of the choices and selections you can also make about formatting a disk, akin to file system, label, cluster dimension, compression, encryption and so forth.”
Plummer then created a fundamental consumer interface that he added to the Home windows NT codebase as a brief resolution “till the elegant consumer interface arrived”. That UI enchancment by no means got here, and almost 30 years later, Plummer's workaround continues to be utilized in Home windows 11 right this moment.
If you happen to're questioning why the format dimension of a FAT quantity in Home windows is restricted to solely 32 GB, it could have been partly on account of Plummer as effectively. “I additionally needed to resolve how a lot 'cluster slack' could be an excessive amount of, and that ended up limiting the format dimension of a FAT quantity to 32GB,” admits Plummer. “That restrict was additionally an arbitrary selection that morning, and one which has stayed with us as a everlasting aspect impact.” FAT truly helps volumes as much as 2TB, however you'll want to make use of a third-party device in Home windows to create this quantity, although Microsoft's working system reads these bigger FAT drives accurately.
Regardless of a number of revisions to the Home windows consumer interface, Microsoft hasn't touched the Format dialog field since its introduction in Home windows NT all these years in the past. There's nonetheless a good quantity of different legacy Home windows UIs you may floor within the newest variations of Home windows, however I think this specific format is an easy case of “if it ain't broke, don't repair it . “