It turns out that there is a small but useful menu in your modern menu Windows PC was designed and built in one day in 1994. It was intended to be a temporary stopgap until something better was created to replace it. That never happened, and now, 30 years later, the man behind that original map has revealed the story behind it.
If you used a Windows PC for the last 20+ years and needed to format a storage drive, you have probably encountered the Format Disk menu box. It is an unassuming, simple but completely user-friendly menu that allows you to reformat drives with various options. The various options are arranged vertically and use drop-down menus. There’s also a start and close option and… er, that’s it. And this functional but basic menu hasn’t changed in over three decades, according to longtime Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer.
On March 24th Plummer posted a long but interesting tweet Explain the story behind the Format dialog box and why it looks like this and the functions are arranged in this vertical arrangement. According to Plummer, he wrote the design of this format menu on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994. The famed programmer says he and the team ported a “bajillion” lines of Windows 95 user interface code back in the day to Windows NT. When it came time to create a user interface for Windows NT’s formatting feature, the two operating systems were just “so different” that Plummer had to develop a new, custom user interface.
“I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and decisions you can make regarding formatting a hard drive, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on,” Plummer explained in his tweet.
“Then I pulled out VC++2.0 and used the resource editor to create a simple vertical stack of all the decisions you needed to make, in the approximate order you needed to make them. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI came along.”
Here’s the thing: That better, more “elegant” UI option never arrived. Thirty years later, Plummer says the dialog option in modern Windows is still the same one he designed and created that day in 1994. “Be careful when checking in on ‘temporary’ solutions,” Plummer added.
What’s funny is that even the lack of consistency in the colons in the menu – some options have them, others don’t – was retained in the final version and remains in the Format Disk box to this day. However, Plummer hinted (jokingly). in a follow-up reply that this “mistake” could finally be fixed. (Strangely enough, the colon in the is always correct German version of Windows 11. Huh!)
Oh, and according to Plummer, he was the one who decided to limit the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. And this decision was a completely “arbitrary decision” that he made that same rainy morning.
“So remember…there are no ‘temporary’ check-ins,” Plummer concluded.
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