Microsoft hasn't updated a specific Windows feature in 30 years – Windows

Since the dialog was meant to be temporary, he decided there was no problem with it appearing superficial or simplistic. However, since then, no one has thought to change it and so it remains the same even in Windows 11.

Dave Plummer, former Microsoft developer, He told this rather interesting story About how the “Format Disk” dialog box appeared in a post on his social media platform X last weekend.

“We were in the process of porting countless lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface to NT, and formatting was one of the features of Windows NT that was so different from Windows 95 that we needed to create a custom user interface,” Dave said. Plummer. “I took a piece of paper and wrote down all the possibilities and choices you can make when it comes to disk formatting, such as file system, volume naming, capacity, allocation unit size, configuration options and so on.”

Dave Plummer then created a basic user interface that he added to the Windows NT Help base as a temporary solution “until an elegant user interface arrived.” This improved UI was never released, and almost 30 years later, Dave Plummer's solution is still used today in Windows 11.

If you're wondering why the FAT volume configuration in Windows is limited to 32GB, Dave Plummer might have something to do with it too. “I also had to decide how much to leave the cluster size so as not to be excessive, and I ended up limiting the FAT volume configuration size to 32GB. This limit was also arbitrary,” admitted Dave Plummer. He added: “The decision I made that morning that turned out to be a permanent side effect.” The FAT file system already supports volumes up to 2TB, but you'll need to use a third-party tool to create them in Windows, although Microsoft's operating system reads them just fine, such large amounts of fat.

Despite numerous revisions to the Windows interface, Microsoft has not touched the storage drive configuration dialog box since its introduction in Windows NT nearly three decades ago. There are still many outdated Windows UI elements in the latest versions of the operating system, and it is likely that Microsoft is selectively following the principle of “if something's not broken, it shouldn't be fixed.”