A feature coded on a rainy Thursday morning.
Some news is serious, some is so sad it makes you cry, and some just makes you smile, like this one from David W. Plummer on his X.com (formerly Twitter) account. The programmer is known for developing many of the features of the Windows operating system, including the famous Task Manager, but it wasn't to talk about this key element of the software that he took to X.com.
I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.
We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from... pic.twitter.com/PbrhQe0n3K
- Dave W Plummer (@davepl1968) March 24, 2024
No, in just a few paragraphs, David W. Plummer returned to a more anecdotal creation, one that he himself explains he wrote on a rainy Thursday morning at the end of 1994. This creation is none other than the dialog box for Windows' built-in formatting application. We've all used this dialog box at one time or another to erase the contents of a hard disk or USB stick, for example. We've all used it to switch a device from FAT32 to NTFS. Well, this dialog box and its associated formatting module were only intended as a temporary solution.
David W. Plummer explains that " formatting was one of the areas where Windows NT was sufficiently different from Windows 95 that we were forced to create a custom user interface ". The tool and its interface were therefore developed relatively quickly, in the knowledge that this temporary solution would later be replaced by a more mature tool. And yet, almost 30 years later on our Windows 11, it's the same module that's being used, with a few modifications (such as the integration of exFAT), but not many stylistic changes.
