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.
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. “I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on,” explained Plummer in his tweet. “Then I busted out VC++2.