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A common rule among developers is that 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 — the “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 delivering a bajillion lines of code from 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 Microsoft developer, 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 interface to NT, and ‘Formatting’ was just one of those areas where Windows NT was so different from Windows 95 that we had to create some kind of interface,” says Plummer. “I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you can make to format a 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 was available.” We still haven’t seen a UI improvement on this element, and almost 30 years later, Plummer’s workaround is still being used in Windows 11. Even with several changes to the Windows UI.
As it turns out, the 32GB FAT volume size limitation when formatting in Windows is also partly due to Plummer.
“I also had to decide exactly what ‘cluster gap’ would be too large, and that resulted in limiting the size of the FAT volume when formatted to 32GB,” admits Plummer. “This restriction was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and it has stayed with us as a permanent side effect.”
The FAT file system actually supports volumes up to 2TB, but you’ll need to use a third-party tool to create such a Windows volume. Although the OS itself correctly reads these larger FAT drives, it can create them.
Source: The Verge
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