Microsoft “forgot” to update this Windows feature for 30 years

On a rainy Thursday morning nearly thirty years ago, a software developer at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, near Seattle, designed a Windows NT dialog box that is still familiar to many today. The field was only intended as a placeholder, so he didn’t put much effort into the layout. Only later did no one think of changing it – and so it can still be found in Windows 10 and 11 today.

Dave Plummer, a former programmer at Microsoft, has this weekend on X the exciting story tells how the Format Drive dialog was created in late 1994 and has survived to this day.

“We were porting countless lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface to NT, and formatting was one of the areas where Windows NT was so different from Windows 95 that we had to develop our own user interface,” says Plummer. “I took a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and decisions you could make when formatting a hard drive, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.”

As a temporary solution, Plummer then created a simple user interface in which all options are arranged one below the other. “It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived,” he says. The new UI never materialized, and almost 30 years later, Plummer’s workaround is still used in Windows 11.

Private users usually no longer see old dialog boxes in Windows 10/11. The communal institutions have long had a modern design. To this day, there are other old user interfaces still lurking in the depths of the Windows system settings, which Microsoft has also never touched. However, as a rule these were not “forgotten”, as you could see from this example. On the contrary, they have deliberately not been changed, partly because IT administrators (you guessed what’s behind this link) have become accustomed to them over the years and sometimes react allergically to layout changes.

The example of the ‘Format Disk’ dialog box, which hasn’t been updated since 1994, is probably a simple case of ‘don’t fix what isn’t broken’.

(oli)