\n
\u201cWe 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,\u201d says Plummer. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Plummer then created a basic UI that he added to the Windows NT codebase as a temporary solution \u201cuntil the elegant UI arrived.\u201d That UI improvement never came, and nearly 30 years later, Plummer\u2019s temporary solution is still in use in Windows 11 today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
If you\u2019re wondering why the format size of a FAT volume in Windows is limited to just 32GB, this might have been partly down to Plummer, too. \u201cI also had to decide how much \u2018cluster slack\u2019 would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB,\u201d admits Plummer. \u201cThat limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.\u201d FAT actually supports volumes of up to 2TB, but you\u2019ll need to use a third-party tool in Windows to create this volume, even if Microsoft\u2019s OS does correctly read these larger FAT drives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Despite several overhauls to the Windows UI, Microsoft hasn\u2019t touched the Format dialog box since its introduction in Windows NT all those years ago. There\u2019s still a fair amount of other old Windows UI that you can surface in the latest versions of Windows, but I\u2019m guessing that this particular Format one is a simple case of \u201cif it ain\u2019t broke, don\u2019t fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n