Windows has seen enough changes and improvements to its user interface over its extensive lifespan. Thousands of visual elements are hidden within Windows, and it is a daunting task for programmers to keep them updated and looking like the rest of the operating system.

One such UI element fell through the cracks: the disk formatting interface from 1994 is still hanging in Windows 11 after all these years.

Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft programmer, talked about the fascinating history of Windows on the social media platform X. He talked about writing the dialog box now used to format a disk in 1994. He said, "I think I wrote this Format dialog in late 1994.

Plummer sat down and wrote out on paper what he needed for the elements of the disk format interface. Then he dove into VC++ 2.0 and put all his choices into a simple vertical stack. Plummer explains, "It wasn't elegant, but it was good enough until the elegant UI came along."

A little more than 30 years later, that UI never actually appeared. Instead, the basic one he created still runs on Windows 11 and does its job as well as ever. Seeing that what he created is still in Windows, he said: "That was about 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary thing from that Thursday morning.

Perhaps equally surprising was Plummer's random 32GB FAT volume limit, and we are still dealing with that decision today. So keep that in mind." There is no such thing as a "temporary" check-in. This advice doesn't just apply to programmers; what you create now could come back to you 30 years from now.