Some of the Windows UI from 1994 still lives on in Windows 11

Windows has undergone numerous user interface changes and improvements over its long lifespan. Thousands of visual elements are tucked inside Windows, making it a difficult task for developers to keep them updated and looking like the rest of the operating system.

One such element of the user interface has slipped through the cracks: the disk formatting interface from 1994 is still present in Windows 11 all these years later.

Former Microsoft developer Dave Plummer took it social media platform X to discuss the fascinating history of Windows. He talked about writing the dialog box currently used to format a disk as far back as 1994. “I wrote this Format dialog box on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think,” he said.

Plummer sat down and planned out on a piece of paper what should be on the disc format interface element. Then it jumped into VC++2.0 and a simple vertical set of all the choices you had to make that we still use today. “It wasn’t elegant, but it served until the elegant user interface arrived,” Plummer explained.

A little over three decades later, that UI element never arrived. Instead, the basic one he created still works in Windows 11, doing the job just as well as ever. He explained how he still saw his creation in Windows: “That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temp as of that Thursday morning, so be careful checking ‘temp’ solutions!”

I wrote this Format dialog on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think so. We ported millions of lines of code from the Windows95 UI to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from… pic.twitter.com/PbrhQe0n3KMarch 24, 2024

Perhaps just as surprisingly, Plummer randomly chose a 32GB limit for FAT volumes, and we still live with that decision today. “So remember… there are no ‘provisional’ applications,” he said. That advice doesn’t just apply to developers, because anything you create now could come back to haunt you in 30 years, so keep that in mind as you put things on the Internet.