Dave W. Plummer quickly created the format interface for a program that used to be an elementary part of Windows: disk formatting.
The plan was an “elegant” user interface
This is therefore the stand-alone program, and not the function that is part of the partitioning program. You’ve surely used it to format floppy disks and USB drives. Anyway: it was a rainy Tuesday morning in rainy Seattle that Plummer quickly put together an interface based on what features were important, including file system, naming, cluster size, compression, encryption “and so on.” That Plummer didn’t have time to think up something more complicated was to the program’s advantage is our thesis: all choices are presented in a compact UI that does exactly what you ask.
Plummer reveals that it could have gone differently, but was forgotten after everyone probably got tired of copying Windows 95 interface code over to Windows NT:
“I used VC++2.0 with the “Resource Editor” and put in a simple vertical stack of all the choices, in the approximate order you wanted to execute them. It wasn’t elegant, but it did the job until the elegant UI came along. That was about 30 years ago, but the interface is still the same temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful with ‘temporary’ solutions!,” recalls Plummer.
It also emerges that the FAT size is a maximum of 32GB because… that was something Plummer went for. There is no other reason than that, because the format supports up to 2TB. The problem still persists: you have to use third-party programs to deal with anything larger, even though Windows can read partitions that are much larger.
“I also had to decide how much ‘cluster slack’ would be too much, and ended up limiting the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us ever since as a permanent side effect,” admits Plummer, who we thank anyway for not wasting our time with a convoluted user interface.
