Sometimes software is developed that ends up having more meaning than originally intended. That is the case a simple graphical Windows disk formatting tool that will be 30 years old in 2024. Dave W. Plummer, the creator of the tool’s GUI, explained that he did it “on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994.”

As Plummer himself explains in his personal account of X, the reason that led to the creation of the disk format dialog was that Microsoft was “moving millions of lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface to NT, and formatting was just one area where Windows NT so different from Windows 95 that we had to create our own user interface.

For the window layout that users see, The developer took a pen and paper and wrote down all the options that could be applied to the disc format, including but not limited to file system, label, cluster size, compression, and encryption. He then used Visual C++ 2.0 and the Resource Editor “to design a simple vertical stack of all the choices that needed to be made in the approximate order in which they had to be made. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until an elegant user interface came along.”

Admittedly, Plummer has done a good job as the GUI is simple, straightforward and generally pretty self-explanatory. These characteristics, along with the traditional immobility that Windows exhibits in many of its aspects, meant that it remained as it is in Windows 11, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system.

Considering the usefulness and efficiency of the graphical interface, it is surprising to find that it was essentially a temporary solution that was planned to be replaced by another in the future. In fact, Plummer recognized making certain arbitrary decisions that have persisted to this day, such as how much “cluster slack” would be too much. This decision ended up limiting the maximum FAT volume size to 32 GB. It should be taken into account that 32GB was a huge storage capacity at the time, while today it would only fit on a pen drive.

In addition to the well-known small window, which is mainly used for formatting drives such as pendrives and external hard drives, Dave W. Plummer also contributed to task management and the famous pinball mini-game, which was present by default in the version of Windows classic along with Solitaire , a known destroyer of labor productivity.