Andrew Cunningham
Windows 11 has done much to refresh and modernize long-neglected parts of the Windows interface, including many settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll find parts of the interface that look and work exactly as they did in the mid-1990s, either because of compatibility or because no one thought to update them.
Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shares some history of one of those old parts: the formatting dialog, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installations when formatting a hard drive using Windows Explorer.
Plummer says he wrote Formatting Dialog in late 1994, when the team was busy porting the user interface from user-oriented Windows 95 (released in mid-1995) to the more stable but resource-intensive Windows NT (NT 4.0, first released). mid-1996), which used a 95-style interface.
Disk formatting was “one of the areas where Windows NT was so different from Windows 95 that we had to develop a custom user interface.” Plummer wrote in X, formerly Twitter. Plummer did not specify these differences, but even early versions of Windows NT could already handle multiple file systems such as FAT and NTFS, while Windows 95 initially used FAT16 for everything.
“I took a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and preferences regarding the disk format, such as file system, naming, cluster size, compression, encryption, etc.,” continued Plummer. “Then I got out [Visual] C++ 2.0 and I use the Resource Editor to assemble a simple vertical array of all the decisions you need to make, roughly in the order you need to make them. It wasn’t elegant, but it will stay that way until elegant UI comes along. That was almost 30 years ago and the dialogue has been in limbo since Thursday morning. So be careful when looking for “temporary” solutions!
The Windows NT version of the Format dialog still exists today, as consumer and professional editions of Windows began using the NT database in the late 1990s and early 2000s, along with the Windows 2000 and Windows XP versions. A lot has changed since then, but system files like the kernel are still labeled “Windows NT” in Windows 11.
Plummer also said that the format tool’s 32GB limit on FAT volumes was an arbitrary decision, and that we still live in newer versions of Windows – FAT32 drives that have been formatted on the command line or using other tools, have limits of 2TB and up. . 16TB depending on sector size. . It seems strange, however PC advertising in late 1994 Hard drives no larger than a few hundred megabytes, 3.5-inch 1.44MB floppy disks, and CD-ROM drives can be used for removable storage. It would be hard to imagine from this perspective Fingernail sized tablets For $20 you get 256GB of storage.
Plummer was involved in many areas of MS-DOS and Windows applications in the 1990s and early 2000s, including task management, Space Cadet Flipper The first version of the game and product activation system that comes with Windows XP. Plummer left Microsoft in 2003.
List images from GT
