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Sometimes a quick and temporary solution becomes a permanent part of a project
It turns out that a small but useful menu inside your modern Windows PC was designed and built in one day in 1994. It was meant to be a temporary stopgap until something better was created to replace it. That never happened, and now, 30 years later, the guy behind that original menu has revealed the story behind it.
If you’ve used a Windows PC in the last 20+ years and had to format a storage drive, you’ve likely encountered the “Format Disk” menu box. It’s a nondescript, simple, barebones, but totally usable menu that lets you reformat drives using different options. The various options are laid out vertically and use drop-down menus. There’s also a start and close option and…uh, that’s it. And this functional but basic menu hasn’t changed in over three decades, according to longtime Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer.
On March 24, Plummer posted a lengthy but interesting tweet explaining the history behind the Format dialog box and why it looks like that and has those features laid out in that vertical manner. According to Plummer, he wrote up the design of this Format menu on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft back in late 1994. The famed programmer says he and the team were at the time porting a “bajillion” lines of Windows 95 user interface code to Windows NT. When it came time to create a UI for Windows NT’s Format feature, the two operating systems were just “different enough” that Plummer had to come up with some new, custom UI.
kotaku.com
It turns out that a small but useful menu inside your modern Windows PC was designed and built in one day in 1994. It was meant to be a temporary stopgap until something better was created to replace it. That never happened, and now, 30 years later, the guy behind that original menu has revealed the story behind it.
If you’ve used a Windows PC in the last 20+ years and had to format a storage drive, you’ve likely encountered the “Format Disk” menu box. It’s a nondescript, simple, barebones, but totally usable menu that lets you reformat drives using different options. The various options are laid out vertically and use drop-down menus. There’s also a start and close option and…uh, that’s it. And this functional but basic menu hasn’t changed in over three decades, according to longtime Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer.
On March 24, Plummer posted a lengthy but interesting tweet explaining the history behind the Format dialog box and why it looks like that and has those features laid out in that vertical manner. According to Plummer, he wrote up the design of this Format menu on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft back in late 1994. The famed programmer says he and the team were at the time porting a “bajillion” lines of Windows 95 user interface code to Windows NT. When it came time to create a UI for Windows NT’s Format feature, the two operating systems were just “different enough” that Plummer had to come up with some new, custom UI.
A 30-Year-Old Menu In Windows Was Meant To Be Temporary, Actually
Sometimes a quick and temporary solution becomes a permanent part of a project
kotaku.com
