<story><title>The Format Dialog in Windows NT</title><url>https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bc_programming</author><text>I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;I also had to decide how much &amp;#x27;cluster slack&amp;#x27; would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;NT4 didn&amp;#x27;t support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn&amp;#x27;t what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.&lt;p&gt;Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He&amp;#x27;s got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what &amp;quot;influencers&amp;quot; do, and that&amp;#x27;s what he is at least trying to be now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chungy</author><text>Memory is a fickle thing, but the format dialog enforcing a FAT32 limit is probably Dave&amp;#x27;s biggest failing when it comes to telling old stories.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if FAT32 was in development in late 1994, it&amp;#x27;s possible, but it sure didn&amp;#x27;t ship in Windows NT 4, nor the original Windows 95. Even when it did land in Windows 95 OSR2, the format command happily accepted partitions up to 128GiB; but okay, Windows 95 isn&amp;#x27;t NT.&lt;p&gt;Windows 2000&amp;#x27;s internal formatting functions appear to be the real reason FAT32 is limited to 32GiB on new formats. The GUI, format command, and diskpart are all equally incapable of creating a &amp;gt;32GiB file system. Why? Who knows, it&amp;#x27;s not like drives of that size or larger didn&amp;#x27;t already exist at the time. If you use, say, mkdosfs on Linux, the VFAT driver in Windows 2000+ will take volumes up to 2TiB, you can even install Windows 2000 on such large volumes.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Format Dialog in Windows NT</title><url>https://twitter.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bc_programming</author><text>I was able to confirm in the Windows NT4 source code that he originally wrote some of the code for the format dialog on 2-13-95. That much is true. (late 1994, early 1995, close enough)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;quot;I also had to decide how much &amp;#x27;cluster slack&amp;#x27; would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;NT4 didn&amp;#x27;t support FAT32, and NT4 actually was actually able to be 4GB rather than 2GB for a FAT volume because NT4 allowed 64K clusters, so actually exceeded what most systems were able to do at the time. Formatting as FAT in NT4 had no cluster check or option. The cluster size used was decided based on the size of the volume.&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the The 32GB limitation for FAT32 volumes was originally in the internal format functions, not the dialog itself. On Windows 2000 (Which does support FAT32) you can try to format a drive bigger than 32GB as FAT32, but the formatting will fail, as it is hard-coded at the end of the format to fail trying to format FAT32 volumes larger than 32GB. The dialog itself isn&amp;#x27;t what presents this limitation and it is shared by the command line format.com which uses the same functions.&lt;p&gt;Not sure why he seems to always exaggerate his own involvement. He&amp;#x27;s got people believing that he wrote the Zip folder code that Microsoft literally licensed from Info-Zip because he had to touch it to get it integrated. I guess exaggeration is what &amp;quot;influencers&amp;quot; do, and that&amp;#x27;s what he is at least trying to be now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Maxious</author><text>&amp;quot;vzip150.zip&amp;quot; credited to plummer@visualzip.com doesn&amp;#x27;t mention anything about info-zip &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sac.sk&amp;#x2F;files.php?d=7&amp;amp;l=V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sac.sk&amp;#x2F;files.php?d=7&amp;amp;l=V&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Where did the covette come from then? &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;windows&amp;#x2F;dev-shows-off-the-little-red-corvette-that-designing-windows-zip-folders-bought-shares-details&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.tomshardware.com&amp;#x2F;software&amp;#x2F;windows&amp;#x2F;dev-shows-off-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>