30 years ago, at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, developer Dave Plummer filed temporary code for the Format dialog box. It was assumed that in the future the appearance and functionality of this window would be redesigned, but no one ever got around to doing this – in Windows 11, the Format tool looks the same as in Windows NT.
“We were porting millions 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 had to come up with our own user interface,” Plummer said. “I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the possible options for formatting the disk, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.”
Based on this primitive “technical specification,” Plummer created a simple formatting utility, which he added to the Windows NT code base as a temporary solution “until an elegant user interface was available.” This UI improvement never materialized, and Plummer's workaround is still used in Windows 11 almost 30 years later.
The 32 GB FAT volume size limit is also partly due to Plummer. “I had to make a decision about the maximum allowable cluster spare size, and ended up with a 32GB limit for the FAT volume,” admits Plummer. “This restriction was an arbitrary choice that morning, and has become a permanent side effect.” In fact, using third-party programs, you can create a FAT volume up to 2 TB in size, which will then work fine in Windows.
Despite generations of changes to the Windows user interface, Microsoft has left the Format dialog box untouched since its introduction in Windows NT many years ago. Apparently, the developers were guided by the principle: “if it works, don’t touch it!”
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