Surprisingly, the Format Drive dialog box has been the same since 1994

The Windows operating system has undergone many user interface changes and improvements, and after 30 years, with Windows 11, one thing that hasn’t changed is Format Drive.

Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer posted on X (formerly Twitter) about the interesting fact about Format Drive:

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

This made us realize that our Format Dialog box was never there to say, as it wasn’t elegant enough. It was a temporary one until the elegant user interface was released.

And 30 years later, the UI never made it, to which Dave W Plummer said:

That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!

Once he mentioned this in the post, a lot of X users, including Tom Warren, Senior Editor at The Verge, expressed their thoughts.

Thomas Entner, CEO – Entner Electronics said:

This is exactly like I imagined that most of Windows was designed…

To which Dave W Plummer responded:

It wasn’t, most of it was very well thought out. It’s not fair to extrapolate from an edge case like this to the rest of the product, and that’s kinda the point of the story.

You can check out the whole conversation here to learn what everybody else said about this on X. Once the conversation started, people started talking about other old features and UI that were made to Windows 11 after all these years.

On one hand, Microsoft has been constantly making changes to make Windows more customizable, and with AI integration, it is all ready to step into the future; however, it has been steady with the changes when it comes to Control Panel features migration to Settings, letting people getting accustomed with the new UI.

Honestly, the current UI for format drive works efficiently, and as Dave W Plummer said, if it had been bad, Microsoft would have changed until now. With so many changes, some of us like to stay connected with old Windows features like they were, as a makeover of the format drive could agitate people more than get excited.

Do you want to see UI and other changes to the Format drive dialog box? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.