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A common rule among developers is — if something works well, don't touch it. Perhaps it is precisely because of this rule that one of the popular functions in Windows operating systems has not undergone changes for almost 30 years — “Format” command window. Although it was originally created as a temporary solution, the window has not yet undergone any changes.
I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.
We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from… pic.twitter.com/PbrhQe0n3K
— Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) March 24, 2024
Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, told an interesting story about how the Format Disk dialog was created many years ago.
“We ported billions of lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface to NT, and Formatting was just one of the areas where Windows NT was so different from Windows 95 that we we had to create some kind of user interface,” says Plummer. “I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you can make to format the drive, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, etc.”
Plummer then created a basic user interface, which he added to the Windows NT code base as a temporary solution “until an elegant interface came along.” We still haven't seen the UI improvements for this element, and almost 30 years later, Plummer's workaround is still in use in Windows 11. Even with several changes to the Windows UI.
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As it turns out, the 32 GB FAT volume size limitation when formatting in Windows is also partly due to Plummer.
“I also had to decide how much of a 'cluster gap' would be too large, which resulted in the FAT volume being limited to 32GB when formatted,” — admits Plummer. “This limitation was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and it has remained with us as a permanent side effect.”
The FAT file system actually supports volumes up to 2 TB in size, but to create such a volume in Windows you will need to use a third-party tool. Although the OS itself correctly reads these larger FAT drives, it cannot create them.
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