A UI that was temporarily designed 30 years ago: Windows 11 hasn’t changed a bit!

Windows, although each generation has a new look, but such a large and complex operating system, it is impossible to take care of all places, and even some interfaces will not change for many years, such as the formatting interface, which has not moved for a full 30 years.

Worked at Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer recalled that the Windows formatting interface was designed by him in 1994, and only a temporary design, did not expect to have been used today.

Dave Plummer revealed that his team was busy shifting the UI design everywhere from Windows 95 to the more stable Windows NT, and one of the new features was hard disk formatting, which required a completely new UI design.

One rainy morning, he took out a piece of paper and wrote down the various options needed for hard disk formatting, including file system, cluster size, volume labeling, compression, encryption, quick formatting, and so on.

He then developed the interface based on Visual C++ 2.0, using a resource editor to vertically arrange the various options into a simple stack.

He admitted that such a design is very inelegant, just a temporary solution, because he felt that he would design a better one later, and did not expect it to be so fixed.

That said, although this interface is a little "ugly", but wins in simple, practical, stable, in fact, there is no need to deliberately change, on the contrary, Windows is now a lot of changes are too deliberate, but more inconvenient, typically the start menu, taskbar, right-click menu these.

Dave Plummer also admitted that the limitation of the FAT32 format to support only 32GB of partition capacity was also a very arbitrary decision on his part, and the only reason for it was the fear that too many clusters would result in wasted space.

Of course, FAT32 is now largely obsolete, and NTFS is much better.

Dave Plummer also worked on many MS-DOS and Windows developments in the 1990s and early 2000s, including the Task Manager, the Space Cadet pinball game, and the first version of the Windows XP activation system, among others, before leaving Microsoft in 2003.