The classic Windows formatting tool looks 30 years old; To look

The classic Windows formatting options window turns 30 in 2024. by former programmer Dave Plummer (@davepl1968) but is still used today.

Plummer reports that the creation of the traditional window took place on a rainy Thursday morning in Microsoft’s offices in 1994. The interface was born out of the need to create a new window for Windows NT, one of the operating system’s iterations.

I wrote this Format dialog on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, that’s what I thought it was.

We were porting millions of lines of code from the Windows95 user interface to NT, and Format was just one of the areas where WindowsNT was different enough that… pic.twitter.com/PbrhQe0n3K

— Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) March 24, 2024

“We were moving a billion lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface [Windows] NT and [janela] “Formatting was just one of the areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to create a custom user interface,” he said.

To quickly fix the problem, Plummer took a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you can make regarding formatting the disk, including file systems, name, cluster size, compression, encryption, and more.

From there he began developing the vehicle. HE The result is a simple window with options arranged vertically, a checkbox for quick formatting and a loading bar showing the progress of the procedure. “It wasn’t elegant, but until a nicer solution comes along, this will do,” he said in his post. Despite, Microsoft never returned to review the appearance of the tool.

“This was nearly 30 years ago and the window is still the temporary window from that Thursday morning, so be careful when coming up with ‘workarounds’!” Plummer joked.

Limit of FAT file system

Plummer admitted that after this compromise, the FAT file system grew to 32 GB. A. the constraint was decided randomly by the programmer. “This border was also an arbitrary choice that morning and it remains with us [na Microsoft] as a permanent side effect,” he said on air.

In fact, the FAT file system supports volumes up to 2 TB, but the Windows tool can only format devices up to 32 GB.