This Windows dialog box has remained unchanged for 30 years

There’s one Windows dialog box that has remained untouched for the past 30 years, despite several operating systems and UI updates.

The dialog box in question is the one that pops up when you try to format a storage drive.

The format drive dialog box was a ‘temporary solution’ when it was designed, though it has remained the same ever since, explained Dave W. Plummer, a former Microsoft developer who wrote the code for the dialog box.

I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.

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

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

“We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI,” wrote Plummer.

While porting over code to Windows NT, Plummer wrote a barebones version of the format drive dialog box, and according to him, “It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.”

However, the ‘elegant UI’ never arrived, The format dialog, functional if not fancy, has remained the same since then.

The quick porting approach also influenced limitations on FAT volume sizes. According to Plummer, he had to decide on a maximum “cluster slack,” and capped the FAT volumes at 32GB.

The ageing dialog box gets the job done, and that is likely why Microsoft hasn’t touched it for 30 years. Check out Plummer’s tweet about the dialog box embedded above or here.

Source: @davepl1968 Via: The Verge