Microsoft forgot to update this Windows feature for 30 years
The Format drive dialog in Windows 11. | Screenshot by Tom Warren / The Verge
On a Thursday morning nearly 30 years ago at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, a software developer checked-in some code for a dialog box he was working on. The box was only supposed to be temporary, so he didn’t worry that it was very basic. Except, nobody ever got around to changing it — and it’s still the same to this day in Windows 11.
Dave Plummer, a former developer at Microsoft, recounted the interesting tale of how the Format drive dialog box was created all those years ago in a post on X over the weekend.
“We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows 95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some…
