On a Thursday morning almost 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 imagined to be short-term, so he didn’t fear that it was very fundamental. Besides, no person ever received 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 traces 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 totally different sufficient from Home windows 95 that we needed to provide you with some customized UI,” says Plummer. “I received out a bit of paper and wrote down all of the choices and selections you may make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster measurement, compression, encryption, and so forth.”
Plummer then created a fundamental 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 almost 30 years later, Plummer’s short-term answer remains to be in use in Home windows 11 immediately.
For those who’re questioning why the format measurement of a FAT quantity in Home windows is restricted to simply 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 measurement 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 facet impact.” FAT really helps volumes of as much as 2TB, however you’ll want to make use of a third-party software 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 you can floor within the newest variations of Home windows, however I’m guessing that this specific Format one is a straightforward case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t repair it.”