There is a common rule among developers: if something works well, don’t touch it. Perhaps it’s because of this rule that one of the most popular features in Windows operating systems hasn’t changed for almost 30 years – the «Format» command window. Although it was originally created as a temporary solution, the window hasn’t changed.
Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, told an interesting story about how the «Format Disk» dialog box was created many years ago.
«We were porting billions of lines of code from the Windows 95 user 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» user interface, — says Plummer. «I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make about formatting a disk, 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 the elegant» interface was available. We are the ones who still haven’t seen an improved user interface for this element, and almost 30 years later, Plummer’s temporary solution is still in use in Windows 11. Even after several changes to the Windows user interface.
As it turns out, the 32 GB FAT volume size limit when formatting in Windows is also partly due to Plummer.
«I also had to decide which «cluster gap» would be too large, and that led to limiting the size of the FAT volume when formatting to 32 GB»,” admits Plummer. «This limitation 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 2 TB in size, but to create such a volume in Windows, you’ll need to use a third-party tool. Although the OS itself reads these larger FAT disks correctly, it cannot create them.
Source: The Verge