On a Thursday morning nearly 30 years ago at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, a software developer logged code for a dialog box he was working on. The box was only supposed to be temporary, so he wasn't worried about it being too basic. Except no one managed to change it, and it remains the same to this day in Windows 11.
Former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer told the interesting story of how the Format Drive dialog was created all those years ago in a publish in X weekend.
“We were moving millions of lines of user interface code from Windows 95 to NT, and formatting was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to create a user interface personalized,” says Plummer. . “I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices I could make regarding the format of a disk, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, etc.”
Plummer then created a basic user interface that he added to the Windows NT codebase as a temporary solution “until the fancy user interface arrived.” That UI improvement never came, and nearly 30 years later, Plummer's workaround is still used in Windows 11 today.
If you're wondering why the format size of a FAT volume in Windows is limited to only 32 GB, this may also be partly due to Plummer. “I also had to decide how much 'cluster slack' would be excessive, and that ended up limiting the format size of a FAT volume to 32 GB,” Plummer admits. “That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and it has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.” FAT actually supports volumes up to 2TB, but you will need to use a third-party tool in Windows to create this volume, even if Microsoft's operating system correctly reads these larger FAT drives.
Despite several revisions to the Windows user interface, Microsoft has not touched the Format dialog box since its introduction in Windows NT all those years ago. There are still a good number of other older Windows UIs that you can display in the latest versions of Windows, but I guess this particular Format is a simple case of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it.” “
