In fact, the 30-year-old Windows menu was intended to be temporary

It seems a small but useful menu inside your modern Windows computer was designed and inbuilt in the future in 1994. It was intended to be a temporary stopgap until something higher got here along to replace it. It never happened, and now, 30 years later, the creator of that original menu has revealed the story behind it.

If you used a A Windows computer inside the last 20 years and also you had to format your drive, you almost certainly encountered the “Format Disk” menu window. It’s an not noticeable, easy, basic, but completely useful menu that enables you to reformat your drives using a wide range of options. The different options are arranged vertically and use drop-down menus. There can be a start and end option and… that is it. According to longtime Microsoft developer Dave Plummer, this functional but basic menu hasn’t modified in over three many years.

March 24 Plummer posted an extended but interesting tweet explaining the history of the Format dialog and why it looks the way it does and has these functions arranged vertically. According to Plummer, he wrote up the design of this Format menu on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994. The famous programmer claims that he and his team were porting “a bajillion” lines of Windows 95 user interface code to WindowsNT during this time. When it got here time to create a user interface for Windows NT’s formatting features, the two operating systems were “different enough” that Plummer had to provide you with a brand new, custom user interface.

“I pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make regarding formatting the drive, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, etc.” Plummer explained in his tweet.

“I then launched VC++ 2.0 and used the Asset Editor to arrange a simple vertical stack of all the selections that needed to be made, in the approximate order they needed to be made. It wasn’t elegant, but it was enough until an elegant user interface came along.

The thing is, a better, “elegant” UI option has never emerged. Thirty years later, Plummer says the dialogue option available in modern Windows is still the same one he designed and created that day in 1994. “Be careful not to check out ‘temporary’ solutions,” Plummer added.

Funnily enough, even the lack of consistency in the menu colons – some options have them, some don’t – was retained in the final version and stays in the Format Disk box to today. However, Plummer suggested (jokingly) in one other reply that this “bug” may eventually be fixed. (Oddly enough, a colon is all the time correct in German version of Windows 11. huh!)

Oh, and according to Plummer, he was the one who decided to limit the FAT volume size to 32GB. And this decision was a totally “arbitrary choice” that he made that very same rainy morning.

“So remember… there are no ‘temporary’ severance packages,” Plummer concluded.

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