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Dave Plummer shared an interesting story proving yet again that nothing is more permanent than temporary.
Over the past weekend, Dave Plummer, a Programmer and former Microsoft Developer known for his notable contributions such as creating Windows Task Manager, porting Space Cadet Pinball, and adding Zip file support to the OS, shared a fascinating tale that proved once again that nothing is more permanent than temporary.
Continuing Plummer's series of behind-the-scenes posts discussing the development of Windows, the latest story revolves around the operating system's Format drive dialog box, which was developed as a temporary solution nearly 30 years ago, back in late 1994.
"We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some custom UI," wrote the developer. "I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.
Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived."
It's been 30 years since then, yet "the elegant UI" never arrived, and a solution devised on a rainy Thursday morning as a non-permanent fix continues to endure, remaining unchanged even in the latest version of the OS, Windows 11.
The story also unveils the reason behind the 32GB limit on the format size of a FAT volume in Windows, with Plummer explaining that this restriction was an arbitrary choice that became a lasting consequence of the Format dialog box staying in its primal form.
"I also had to decide how much 'cluster slack' would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB," the story reads. "That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect. So remember... there are no 'temporary' check-ins."
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