This seemingly innocuous box has remained stubbornly unchanged for nearly three decades, and now we know why. Plummer confessed that the dialogue box was born out of necessity during the tricky code transition from Windows 95 to Windows NT..

“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 Windows95 that we had to come up with some 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 filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.  Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make.  It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.”

The two systems are as different as chalk and cheese. Plummer scribbled down all the formatting options on a scrap of paper and cobbled together a basic UI. This was meant to be a stopgap until a more polished version could be developed.

But, in a twist worthy of a soap opera, the intended UI improvement never saw the light of day, and Plummer's 'quick fix' has stuck around through countless Windows versions, right up to the latest Windows 11.

Plummer also let slip that he made the 32GB limit on FAT volume size in Windows on the fly, and it has since become a permanent fixture.”

“So remember... there are no "temporary" checkins,” he tweeted.

Of course, if it is not broke why should you rush to mend it?