On a Thursday morning practically 30 years in the past at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, a software program developer checked-in some code for a dialog field he was engaged on. The field was solely purported to be momentary, so he didn’t fear that it was very primary. Besides, no person ever bought round to altering it — and it’s nonetheless the identical to at the present time in Home windows 11.
Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, recounted the fascinating story of how the Format drive dialog field was created all these years in the past in a put up on X over the weekend.
“We had been porting the bajillion strains of code from the Home windows 95 consumer interface over to NT, and Format was simply a kind of areas the place Home windows NT was completely different sufficient from Home windows 95 that we needed to provide you with some customized UI,” says Plummer. “I bought out a chunk of paper and wrote down all of the choices and decisions you may make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster dimension, compression, encryption, and so forth.”
Plummer then created a primary UI that he added to the Home windows NT codebase as a short lived answer “till the elegant UI arrived.” That UI enchancment by no means got here, and practically 30 years later, Plummer’s momentary answer remains to be in use in Home windows 11 at the moment.
Should you’re questioning why the format dimension of a FAT quantity in Home windows is restricted to only 32GB, this may need been partly right down to Plummer, too. “I additionally needed to determine how a lot ‘cluster slack’ could be an excessive amount of, and that wound up constraining the format dimension of a FAT quantity to 32GB,” admits Plummer. “That restrict was additionally an arbitrary alternative that morning, and one which has caught with us as a everlasting aspect impact.” FAT really helps volumes of as much as 2TB, however you’ll want to make use of a third-party device in Home windows to create this quantity, even when Microsoft’s OS does accurately learn these bigger FAT drives.
Regardless of a number of overhauls to the Home windows UI, 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 previous Home windows UI that you could floor within the newest variations of Home windows, however I’m guessing that this specific Format one is an easy case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t repair it.”