On X (Twitter), former Microsoft employee Dave Plummer explained why a certain Windows feature seems so old. It’s simple: it’s because it is. In fact, it has now been 30 years since the Redmond firm has still not updated this small utility. We tell you this story.
If you’re a long-time Windows user the name Dave Plummer may ring a bell. Indeed, he is one of the most legendary developers of the operating system, responsible for utilities such as the task manager or the cult Pinball. Dave Plummer left Microsoft in 2003 with a very heavy legacy, which the firm has worked to update in the years that followed.
Well, not for everything. Indeed, there is a utility still present today on Windows which has remained the same since its creation, more than 30 years ago. The latter is even a bit of a task today in the middle of the much more modern interface of Windows 11. This utility is the disk formatting tool, which has therefore not been updated since all this time. Dave Plummer shared his story in a thread on X (Twitter).
This Windows utility hasn’t been updated in 30 years
It was while he was working on porting the Windows 95 code to Windows NT that Dave Plummer looked again at the formatting utility. “It was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to create a custom user interface,” he explains. The programmer then gets to work and puts down on paper all the functionalities that the tool must present.
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Once done, it then creates the utility interface before importing it into Windows NT. According to him, this interface was supposed to be temporary, before the final version arrived. But it seems that Microsoft executives are sufficiently convinced by its work that they do not consider it necessary to improve it. Even today, it seems.
However, certain details deserve to be brought up to date. In particular, Dave Plummer emphasizes that the fact that the FAT format is limited to 32 GB – against a maximum of 2 TB in theory – was a purely arbitrary choice on his part. However, this has still not been corrected over time, forcing users to turn to third-party utilities. As long as it works…