Some of the work in my current project for where I work as a software developer was done under the assumption and understanding it was temporary. Now, it’s going to be official. At least, I have some time to polish it.
@@kiseitai2 Stuff like that happened to me, too. Some "working prototypes" which are suddenly sent out to customers for which I then have to offer support.
You wrote all the coolest nerdy parts of Windows: activation, Task Manager, ZIP Folders, Shell, Format UI... You are the Andy Hertzfeld of Microsoft. These videos are catnip. Your work has been the wallpaper of my life.
Am I the only person who finds it absolutely fascinating that this guy made decisions that affected all of us, and that now we can interact with him? I remember, as a teenager, asking my computer teacher about this limit and she didn't know. All these years later I get to hear it from the guy himself. Too cool.
I remember posting a question about programming in C to one of the BBS net boards and getting a reply from Dennis Ritchie. Yes, the Dennis Ritchie that created C. He was very active on the programming section of the net board I posted to apparently. The only net board I remember the name of now was Fidonet, but I'm not sure if that is where I posted it. The question was something about static.
It's all waaaay too cool...you realize that hearing from Dave Plummer is basically equivalent to talking to Bill Gates himself, he was THAT influential in the design of Windows during its most revolutionary era spanning from Win95 to Windows XP. Man's a legend and yet here he is talking to us on UA-cam like your favorite old neighbor who has the most fascinating stories to tell. I like that...really cool! 👍☺️😁😅
@@Roxor128 That works right until the code review is rejected because it wasn't a one line Band-Aid with no comments. There's nothing quite like that feeling.
I've personally always enjoyed the design of the Windows formatter, It's simple yet gives me all options I want the majority of the time I need to format something. Thank you, Dave!
It's not flashy, but it does everything I want it to do and is small/easy to use. Compare this to the current windows 10 UI where everything is hidden behind text links which EVENTUALLY lead you to the old windows XP system tools. Bruh
Only thing that would make it better would be a mod to remove his limit. It's definitely doable x86 assembly programming isn't exactly easy but it isn't rocket science either. Yet no one seems to want to touch it.
I was the QA lead of the DOS\Windows base team from 1987-1997, FAT32 was my last major accomplishment at Microsoft before I retired early because of health reasons. The developer who designed FAT32 died in 2008. I remember the day we handed off the completed FAT32 driver after it passed all of our tests to the NT group and it is still functioning in Windows 10. It was QA department fault for not reporting the problem of 32GB limit and fighting for a change. I found design time QA was most important In operating system development. We won control of MS-DOS 5 from IBM because of of design time QA suggestions I made during DOS 4. Both involved choices we made different than IBM in MS-DOS setup and disk caching smartdrv.sys. At least there was a work around artificial 32GB limit, 3rd party tools or venders pre-formating larger FAT32 drives so they would work.
I remember buying a 640gb western digital external hard drive that was FAT32 from the factory. was good because it would work with our tv set top box to record tv shows ect but I did end up formatting it into NTFS eventually when i realised that some of the games i was trying to install were failing because of the 4gb file size limit, but i did loose support with the recorder after that.
Another option for Microsoft would have been to support file systems used by Linux which didn't have this limitation but at this time it was viewed by Microsoft as a competitor. They've since made contributions to the different distributions.
It's cool isn't it? I knew somebody, possibly a whole department made that seemingly arbitrary decision but it was this one guy, who now we can see on youtube and even talk with him.
For this reason i still have A LOT of 32gb sticks for old devices .... it would be a lot better for them to support more but 32gb seems to be the hassle free silverline
@@fredtaylor9792 That's the best part - people will get furious over some stuff, concoct these "logical conspiracies, I mean it's all right there for everyone to see", and spit venom towards all the corrupt individuals who have clearly chosen to participate in making this dude's life hell because of an obviously greed-driven, monopolistic, anti-consumer, bureaucratic decision... ...but, it was actually just this really nice guy that thought he was working on a temporary piece of a project, who thought he was making a reasonably forward leaning decision(took the biggest card on the market, multiplied its capacity by 1000, and doubled that) for the purpose of the project. And, because this is how humans work, the temporary chunk ended up becoming permanent, leaving us with this somewhat arbitrary limitation. And, that's literally the "reason" why we've ended up here, cuz humans gonna human; not because Microsoft was trying to squeeze an extra 0.01% of margin out of their IP at consumer expense.
The x86 instruction set was also a quick short term spec someone at Intel came up with in order ship the 8088 chip, which itself was a stop gap until they got around to shipping the "real" chip. 40 years later that "proper" chip never shipped.
The 68K was a was better CPU but time to market was the issue. Intel hacked a solution to get it out the door and we had to suffer with that decision to this day!
I love this. I have lazily wondered about the 32GB limit in the past and just concluded that it must make sense in a way I didn't understand. And there it is: 1000x the largest memory card the developer could get, times two for good measure. There's just no arguing with that. Please do keep making these videos; I love these first-hand accounts concerning the development of the OS's I've been using since the first time I turned on a computer, approximately 35 years ago.
@@DavesGarage I would be interested in anything that, as an OS user, you tend to take for granted but incorporates discrete decisions and took solid work to make work. Which, basically, is everything of course. (I'm in software development myself, so I know that making it look obvious and preventing angry phone calls is half the work.)
Yeah, Dave, I want to know who thought fast start up was a good idea. Especially since it was instituted right around the time SSD boot drives were becoming popular, thereby negating any possible advantage fast start up might have had. Hibernation in general is flaky and unreliable, and to make it the default when shutting down windows is utterly ridiculous. Not that I expect you to have an answer for this one since you were likely long gone when this came to pass.
@@DavesGarageyou weren't asking me and I'm a bit late BUT... Id be interested in a technical deep dive into the different sleep states, and why windows has such a hard time properly going into and out of sleep states on certain laptops.... Leading to some unnecessary backpack heat and a post all nighter pre-presentation panic attack as you fish out a lifeless paperweight that once contained your dissertation... Any chance to hear you talk about bios/uefi and startup/shutdown mechanisms is extremely fascinating!!
Clever mug shot at the end for the time elapsed. They say "never meet your heroes." For you, I think I'd make an exception. As often as I've used the Format dialog over various Windows versions, it's never failed me. Thanks for that.
Dude, the UI is perfect. Modern UI stuff is so unintuitive. I thought an app had lost a feature after a UI update until my sister showed me how to do it months later
The new windows panels are horrific. They're a little bit prettier but system settings and maintenance should be ways to use, not pretty. Windows 10 maintenance has been a massive leap backwards for me. Something as simple as getting to advanced mouse options or sound settings should be trivial...
@@mattbrewerton6884 for me, the beauty of old control panel is that you see high-level categories, but as you need, you get to low-level settings in just two or three clicks reading/looking just one or two options/icons, and of course, the homogeneity of ui
Your stories are so interesting especially to those of us who had to work with early versions of Windows. Brings back painful memories of Nt servers back in the 90s . Dave you are a legend.
@@fernandomaroli8481 The zip-file module fooled me years ago with many small files. A customer couldn't see all the files in a zip i created, because the windows implementation had an error. With winrar/winzip or 7zip it worked perfectly.
@@fernandomaroli8481 The inventor of the zip format was Phil Katz. It's signed in every zip file: He used his own initials as the file identifier. That's why the first two bytes of every zip file say 'PK'.
Dave, your channel is absolutely wonderful. There is a whole generation of guys/gals that have just been dying to have the curtain behind Windows history pulled back a few inches for a peek inside. And the way you do it is just awesome... Love your candor. I'm soooo glad you've done this for us!
Great interface work! All the options could be selected and viewed in a single window - what a concept! No wonder this disk format UI panel has been around unchanged for so long, and will survive into the years ahead.
@@Anticorriente "Reuse" makes it sound like they started over and used old parts, that worked, again in the new version. But it's more like they've never updated anything and just keep adding features on top of old sh*t.
I like that though. If something doesn't need fixing, then leave it be is something I like to stick to. And something I have learned from personal experience. It reminds me of when I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade my vehicles lighting to LED... They ended up flickering, being too cool to remove moisture, going bad and generally looking tacky. I went back to incandesent and never looked back.
@@dancoulson6579 that really shouldn't be a problem. Bad wiring design of the car mfr or the LED mfr. I suspect the latter the more I think about it. Lots of cheap, unreliable products out there. For outside indicator lights like tail and stop lights, there can be a problem though with the position and light beam direction not in tune with the plastic reflective surface.
Sir, if your work has lasted 20 years, and served Billions of times dare i say your minimalist yet functional UI Style is appreciated. I for one used it a hundred times or two and unless there was a hardware failure, your work got the job done time after Time from XP all the way to 10
Just discovered your channel. I'm a mainframer turned Windows programmer. To hear the creator of these tools we've used for 25-30 years . . . . . . it's a bit like hearing God discuss the travails of creating the Universe. :-) Great fun. Enjoyed all so far.
Well... Hello! We finally met) Back in the days I was using fat32 to share file between Linux and Windows. I used to create partitions and disks under Linux. I was really surprised when tryed it under Windows. Thanks to you)
Dave, you're an awesome engineer. The way you explain things is clear, simple, and to the point. Doesn't take a genius to understand the thought process or decision making you communicate, just a cursory knowledge of how these systems work. It's extremely refreshing.
Thanks for that explanation. The place where this limit has really come to bite people is when a novice is trying to set up a Raspberry Pi. For those who don't already know, a Pi's boot loader must be on a FAT file system, even though Linux itself uses other file systems (most commonly, one of the ext variants). Today, there are apps for Windows and macOS that will prepare an SD card with everything set up the way a Pi expects it, so the issue is moot today. But a year or so ago, the most common way to set up a new Pi was to format the SD card as FAT and copy a package called "Noobs" onto it. A Pi would boot that and present a menu you could use to dynamically repartition the card and install the operating system of your choice. This worked great for SD cards of 32GB or less. For a 64GB card, however, Windows users couldn't format the card easily. They needed to use the command-line formatter or a different operating system (e.g. another Linux system or a Mac). Of course, experienced users didn't bother with Noobs at all. It was easier to download a full card image file containing the FAT boot partition and an ext partition with Linux pre-loaded. Just use a binary image copier tool to copy it to an SD card of any size. On the first bootup, the system would resize the ext partition to fill all the remaining space on the ext card without you caring about the rest. But it's all moot today, because the Raspberry Pi people now provide a much more convenient tool for installing OS images onto SD cards.
I'm fascinated by these inner working videos. Tools I've been using since childhood and the guy who made them (or participated in the development). It's so satisfying. I'm fine with multipart and long videos cos I never get tired of those stories.
I agree with this. I think it’s great to put a face to the six-letter name and to learn about design decisions and compromises when developing tools or subsystems. Never gets boring! Thanks much for these videos.
I love the coffee cup voiceover. It's product placement AND clever audio edit in one! 😁 BTW - I too am on 'Team Dave' when it comes to physical controls in cars. A moving cars is no place for nested menu controls!
The important stuff in my Nissan Pathfinder are physical buttons, the stereo, heat and air, and the cruise control. That's about all I do. Sometimes I'll change the channel on the Sirius-XM on the touch screen. There are buttons, but I never learned them.
@@DavesGarage Just out of curiosity, do you remember where it is in the source tree? I want to find the format tool in the XP source code leak. [edited for clarification]
I love your stories! Just found your channel and I can’t stop watching. Coming from an IT guy, this is some of the most compelling and interesting content on UA-cam. Please keep ‘em coming! :)
I work at a company that makes LiDAR systems. We use FAT32 formatted storage on our systems. Our new customers have no end of trouble because they think they can just format in Windows native utility. (Our disks we supply are 256gb minimum, so no hope of native fat32). Now I find out all the woe is due to one of my favorite youtubers!! haha
I remember another weakness of the Format dialogue, at least in Windows XP, was that it wouldn't format 720k floppy disks! I figured it was such a small use case by then that it had been overlooked, and that was the first time I ever used the command line for anything. (I had a bunch of disks given to me for free and they were useful for shuffling homework to and from school before I could afford a USB drive). I love how long code survives in various places, it's always astonishing to see bits that haven't changed in decades shipped with brand new PCs. Love the channel :)
I have a book that says u could format that size floppy disk at least in DOS, but it did require switches and typing some numbers.. I had few extra floppy disks from Amiga 500 days, but it was a bit too cumbersome indeed to format them..
@@Kimmobiino those were only 1.44 "megabytes". Single-sided 3.5" floppy was 720 "kilobytes". (In quotes because I don't remember off the top of my head if those sizes are really Mebibytes and Kibibytes.
Back in the day I would cut open a tab on the floppy sleeve to mark the floppy as double sidded. The magnetic media manufacturers didn't actually produce single sided media. Just a filled or unfilled spot on the sleeve told the drive if it was single or double sidded.
1.44MB = High Density (double sided), the "standard" (in the 90s and later anyway) PC disks 720KB = Double Density (double sided), used by the Amiga and earlier PCs (though the Amiga could fit either 880KB or 901KB onto one of these because it formatted the disks differently from MS-DOS and Windows) Single sided disks were even earlier and held only 360-400KB.
That pro-tip stunned me! It explains why, at the time of drives going beyond the limit, I would experience format failures.. but also successes via command line! I don't think I realised this! That said, having worked with devs and engineers for years + big biz - I am not totally surprised! Thanks Dave!
I would like to see a video about disk formatting, what it is, what does it do, the difference between full and quick format… and I now you wouldn’t disappoint us making one. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. As a future engineer, this kind of content is so helpful.
It is so strange (in a good way) to learn about these projects you had over at MS in the 90s. Growing up with MS-DOS, Win 3.1 and further 95. This is a real story time for me. You made a lot of the relevant tools in WIndows, it's so fun to learn about what the thoughts were, behind every decision.
Thank you for sharing this. I understand that when the product need to be shipped, temporary become permanent. It's too often the norm. I think that the UI and the backend should have allowed to use the full FAT32 capability. A simple warning to the user over 32G may have done the job. In the early 2000s I was working on a mp3 player projet using an hard drive. Since most mp3 file was around 4MB, there was not much waste of data on 80GB or 160GB FAT32 partitioned drives. I had coded the FAT32 reader in assembly language and I was able to read up to 2TB since we were using MBR at that time. Further more, the NTFS specification was proprietary and the only option accessible for me at time was to port the read only NTFS driver that was available for Linux to my MCU. It required too many effort in the timeframe I had. At the end I wrote my own format program that calculate and write sectors directly to the disk because fmifs.dll (the Windows format backend) was refusing to format over 32GB in FAT32. The software was to be distributed with the player. I always hated this kind of the decision from MS and many nore. I switched to a more permissive operating system for almost 10 years now and for good.
A common concept in chinese ... "差不多" Cha Bu Duo -- EG " Good Enough" =P - Thank you for your service as format both GUI has worked with no issues for me =P Appreciate the entertainment and insider look. Subbed and Liked -- 11months after you published this :P
@@darrinito touchscreen laptops (or tablets with attachable keyboards) are useful for watching videos or browsing the web in the bed, or for drawing. You really can't do those things comfortably with a mouse.
My first viewing of any of your videos. I have not gone through the over 1300 comments on this one to see if anyone else recognized it but I was thrilled at The Friendly Giant homage ending! Childhood memories awakened.
As usual, another completely awesome video. I love these bits of the arcane. I love it more because I've used the format app thousands of times over the last 30 years and now I know the guy that wrote it!
In the early 80's I was head of a very small experimental team developing Computer Based Training (CBT) for a Fortune 100 company. We had developed a program under DOS 3/3.1, but this was so early in the IBM PC world that most offices only had single floppy PC's (can you imagine?!), and since the OS had to be on the same floppy as the program we had to format the floppies with the /S option to leave room on the floppy for the user to SYS it since we couldn't distribute the OS. When DOS 4 came out we migrated to it quickly and continued our normal distribution. However, within days of shipping the first copies sent out with floppies formatted with /S under DOS 4, we got calls saying the floppies didn't work! Long story short, the initial release of DOS 4 (done by IBM, not Microsoft) had failed to update the /S option to allocate enough of the floppy for the larger OS, so when the user SYS'd the floppy, part of our program was overwritten. It took several hours on the phone with IBM (who only took my call because I was with a corporation with an equally impressive three capital letter name) to explain, get transferred, explain again, get transferred again, and explain again before someone that understood what I was saying was the problem understood. We got an updated version of DOS 4 within a week, and IBM gave up on trying to deal with DOS with version 4.1 that came out shortly thereafter.
I marvel at the strides we made in storage. The 10MB HardCards were awesome, then I thought I died and went to heaven when I bought my 320MB Quantum drives (for about $500 at the time). Now 8GB MicroSD cards are throwaway items. Thanks for the inside look at the operating system and tools. Fascinating stuff! It's like a true version of Halt and Catch Fire!
Was already subbed from previous content, but I'm so here for this. Legit laughed out loud with the Simpsons-esque coffee cup over the mouth gag. Well done.
Man, I wish I could have met Dave when I was younger. I became a certified computer tech when I was 14 .. 23 years ago. My uncle was in military intelligence and started me with a real old computer that I can't remember the name of, but after I learned the insides of it he 'upgraded' me to a Tandy 😂 (Edit: 23 yrs exp and Dave always teaches me a thing or two that never occurred to me for whatever reason, this channel is a true blessing. I will never forget to give him his well earned likes!!)
I'm triggered by the fact that "Capacity:" has a colon while the other labels don't! For those without a UI background, as a rule of thumb, never include colons in your labels or titles. This goes for headings in Word documents as well.
@@todortodorov940 You already have a marked field right after it (or linebreak in case of word documents). It appears less cluttered and simpler. And just looks better.
@@maze42d So it is purely visual consideration. I would have thought that from grammatical perspective it's better to have the colon. For example, "Print orientation: *Landscape*", except that in this sentence the word *Landscape* is a drop-down, so you can choose other options.
I initially had a hard time understanding Registry and moving to it from INI files. Yep, I go that far back as a technician. The main challenge was knowing where the elements were and what they did.
@@glasser2819 what many probably don't realize is that the hives are individual files. Like Current User is the DAT file at the root of your user profile folder.
Thanks for the insight and for sharing your thought process. You are in good company with your "temporary solution". Vinton G. Cerf comes to mind with his "32 bit is enough for a small military test network" for IPv4. Hard to prevent such things since they seem so logical at the time.
My first HDD was a 3.5" 5400 rpm ~1000 MB drive. I've seen 2 TB microSD cards the size of half a stamp. Tough to prepare (or imagine) for limits in that range (or larger). For you're diligence to simplicity, I salute you! (I've used you're GUI for formatting, well since DOS and Hercules).
Very interesting stories. It's fascinating seeing and listening to the guy who created pieces of software nearly everyone in the world has and continues to use multiple times over many years/decades.. and he describes and explains everything in great detail whilst keeping it very interesting... Great channel
The more i watch your videos the more i see you as a legend. That dialog is legendary. I don't think there is a person that ever used a PC that didn't see that disk format dialog at least once in his life. Sometimes you love it, it works out of the box, and sometimes it screws you up and you hate it. It all dependent on device and choices for formatting i was choosing at that given point in time. Nevertheless you are a legend :)
You did a great job on the UI. It's a travesty that today's UI designers think everything needs to be a huge button with tons of white space around it. Take Steam for example. It used to be a very good program with a great, user friendly UI that was full of information and took up little screen space. Today, it's massive, takes up half your screen and shows LESS information even though it uses 5x more screen space. We're going backwards as far as user interfaces are concerned.
I find it infuriating. Everything seems to be dumbed down and made for babies or blind people. Some UIs are five times bigger, or more, than they need to be. Backup software that I need to maximize on my 4K screen just so I can properly navigate a folder tree is ridiculous. I want more pixels so I have more space, but what seems to be happening is that I need more pixels to be able to fit the same stuff as I used to be able to on a smaller screen, because the stuff is getting bigger.
I maintained and sometimes enhanced and customised operating system software for IBM mainframe computers. My users were applications programmers. One of my projects was to design menus for common tasks. I provided sensible defaults, and remembered their individual choices. And each task within the menu structure solicited all relevant information on one page. Since I regularly saw my users around the office, and got to talk to them, I was sure that they were happy.
About exFAT licensing: Microsoft made the exFAT-Specification publicly available and licensed at least for the Linux kernel. There is an implentation released in Kernel 5.4. So if you're build something upon the Linux Kernel, you'll be out of this dilemma. Everywhere else, you're still need a license.
Windows should just start supporting more file systems. They are starting to embrace Linux which is awesome. NTFS is so dated, imagine being able to habe your c: drive be ext4 or btrfs!
@@MaxUgly NTFS is probably just there for the single reason of supporting Bitlocker, which IIRC only work on that format. There would also need some work on symlink support in order to bring those new format into the system, I think.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Windows already makes use of hard and symlinks. Hard links require no special support from the file system itself. Not allowing hardlinks in FAT is more of a safeguard than a technical limitation. ext* and btrfs does support symlinks.
RE licensing. I thought that had to be the case. Drones supported EXFat for years, and their code is based on Linux Doesn't Android also natively support ExFAT as well?
Thanks Dave. I'm not a programming genius like you are, but after 15 years of owning a computer shop, I guess I've formatted quite a few drives and repaired/reloaded a few thousands times the MS Windows. You, sir, are a legend! On a historical note, I don't know if this is an all-time record, but would you believe our local FM radio station here in the N GA mountains is still operating on an automation program called "Systemation" that runs on DOS 6.22? It's true. I'll not mention the station ID so as not to embarrass them. But their hard drive finally ground to a halt last week after 24 years of constant spinning. I dug around my bone yard for a 3.5" floppy and got a replacement IDE drive setup, then copied files from a backup CD; fixed a batch file error to get the sound card drivers loaded. Good news, they're back in business.
I think the UI spot on. This is occasionally used tool where I want to see a single window with clear and obvious inputs and a button at the bottom to make it happen. After all, I wouldn't go into a hardware store and buy a hammer for its looks! :-)
I'm a fan of the "SD Memory Card Formatter" tool from the SD Association - if you're goofing around with formatting SD cards, this thing picks the correct file system parameters so your card will work the way it ought to.
Just found this series and I'm loving it! I unknowingly cursed your name for years. :) I did a bunch of Android multimedia stuff around when 64GB cards/drives started coming out. At the time most Android devices could read/write FAT, but not exFAT. Even worse, most Android devices prompted the user to reformat the exFAT drives as FAT. I don't know how many users I sent RidgeCorp's FAT32 format util too.
I think BTRFS (which Linux natively supports, and you can install a driver on Windows for) is the only file system that fixes cluster slack. The FATs have cluster slack. NTFS has it. EXT2/3/4 have it too. BTRFS, however, allows multiple small files to sit in a single cluster.
I like the uniform UI-style of the late 90s so much more than ever changing new styles which seem be optmized for smartphones no matter if that is even a use case. It's so annoying that with every update stuff gets moved around, renamed or completely removed for no apparent reason. And yes indeed now where I'm getting older, I've learned to value good old physical buttons and switches and I'm much more open and respectful to old ideas and solutions. New is not always better and most things simply can't be improved indefinitely in a reasonable manner.
But back then (mid-90s) Linux was kind of grim, just RedHat and a couple of other distros. Now it's cool, but was pretty new back then! I did contribute a piece of small code way back though,. Now I love WSL, it's the way to go!
Dave, I share your hard knob preference which reflects in keeping the old car and in the UI design for formatting partitions! In addition to that I'd like to thank for the complete and understable explanation how the dialogue came to be. I like the high density of that posting as well as measured in information divided by the run-time of your video. Thank you.
Spent 3 hours on Christmas eve stuck at work trying to do a software update on a car's infotainment system which refused to correctly read an exfat 64gb USB stick. I just assumed formatting it to fat32 wasn't possible since the windows dialogue didn't allow it. Eventually found a 32GB stick which would work. Damn you Dave and your arbitrary decisions!!!
My Jeep will ONLY read thumb drives formatted Fat32. I use it on a 64 Gig thumb drive.... but at least I get to listen to all of my favorite songs again :)
Thoroughly enjoyed this episode Dave! Yeah it’s hard to look back and realize “oh shoot I should have changed that.”
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Very interesting video! I'm wondering however why FAT32 does not use the top 4 bits of the FAT table entries (thus limited to maximum of 2^28 clusters), thus it's really "FAT28" only. I learnt this surprising fact (well, it was for me) when I wrote a FAT32 "driver" for Commodore 64 (yes, I know ...).
9:45 Unfortunately, one of the recent Windows 10 releases actively prevent you from using CLI tools to format a large memory card as FAT32. Both format and diskpart are incapable of doing so. As far as I'm aware, using a third-party utility (or using macOS/Linux) is the only option available now.
@@chlorobyte_projects Not all devices support exFAT or NTFS. Older digital cameras, game consoles, media players, and retro PCs all support large drives but often cannot support modern filesystems.
@@Spectere Yes, but the corollary is that these older devices (I have many) don't *_accept_* a large format memory card anyway, regardless of filesystem, so it's pretty much a null argument in most use cases.
@@Blitterbug I never said that it wasn't a niche thing, but it does affect me. I have several devices that I still use regularly (my iPod classic, Xbox 360, and vintage 1998 retro PC) that will support both large drives and large filesystems, but do _not_ support exFAT. Not everything is subject to the generational rift between extended SD card formats-retrofits and devices that support other flash formats (such as CompactFlash or the USB mass storage support on Windows 98 and the Xbox 360) have long since been able to exceed that 32GB limit without the ability to natively support newer filesystems. Also, just because a device supports exFAT doesn't mean that it's the right option. It doesn't take much searching to find reports of people who wound up with data loss and corruption due to the buggy exFAT driver in the Nintendo Switch. If it were one or two reports I'd chalk it down to a few people using cheap flash cards, but it's so bad that using RetroArch on a modded Switch, or even playing enough Pokémon Sword/Shield on an unmodded console, is basically a death sentence for your data. Still, this is all a very moot point. All I did with my original comment was point out that a workaround that Dave himself brought up in the video (at the given timestamp) is no longer possible in newer versions of Windows. I'm all for making it a slight inconvenience, as I've borne witness to several cursed FAT32 Windows XP installs back in the day, but removing the ability to do it entirely is just silly and largely pointless.
Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution.
So very true!
Well...it may be true....for now!
This is of course temporary.
Some of the work in my current project for where I work as a software developer was done under the assumption and understanding it was temporary. Now, it’s going to be official. At least, I have some time to polish it.
@@kiseitai2 Stuff like that happened to me, too. Some "working prototypes" which are suddenly sent out to customers for which I then have to offer support.
You wrote all the coolest nerdy parts of Windows: activation, Task Manager, ZIP Folders, Shell, Format UI... You are the Andy Hertzfeld of Microsoft. These videos are catnip. Your work has been the wallpaper of my life.
Why are cats watching his videos?
@@garethwillis because they're cool ... for cats...😏
looked that name up, looks like a psychopath..
@@peterfitzpatrick7032 coooooooooool for caaats
@@garethwillis Found a non-cat! Let's get 'im everyone!
Am I the only person who finds it absolutely fascinating that this guy made decisions that affected all of us, and that now we can interact with him? I remember, as a teenager, asking my computer teacher about this limit and she didn't know. All these years later I get to hear it from the guy himself. Too cool.
I remember posting a question about programming in C to one of the BBS net boards and getting a reply from Dennis Ritchie. Yes, the Dennis Ritchie that created C. He was very active on the programming section of the net board I posted to apparently.
The only net board I remember the name of now was Fidonet, but I'm not sure if that is where I posted it.
The question was something about static.
@@Hanneth That's too cool.
It's all waaaay too cool...you realize that hearing from Dave Plummer is basically equivalent to talking to Bill Gates himself, he was THAT influential in the design of Windows during its most revolutionary era spanning from Win95 to Windows XP.
Man's a legend and yet here he is talking to us on UA-cam like your favorite old neighbor who has the most fascinating stories to tell.
I like that...really cool! 👍☺️😁😅
You almost feel like you can say "I personally know one of the major code developers of Win95"
@@danman32 Yeah, it kinda does...
And you can also say he's a pretty cool guy. I can bet hanging out with him would be HELLA awesome! 😅😁
'Why? Because i said so.'
Well... it's moment's like this I'm glad that the actual guy that worked on some of this is chronicling things.
Thank you.
I'm a computer science student, and hearing about the stories of previous developers is inspiring! Not to mention very entertaining, thanks Dave!
Thanks! I was a computer science student not that long ago, it seems...
I cannot believe I'm coexisting with the people who created the first computors and programs and phones......
@@joroc Its all still brand new. It's amazing and terrifying how far we've advanced technology in less than a lifetime.
@@joroc Well, the first computers as WE know them today anyway, lol
@@RyTrapp0because your "real first" were very significant and many people had them 😌
Its crazy how much this guy has done in its lifetime and now happens to have a YT channel. Almost unbelievable.
Ah, a reminder of the old guideline "Write your code like it will be the final version ever made, because it very well might be."
Then it is never going to be finished
@@core36 It's not advocating for perfection (that would indeed mean it'll never be finished), just something you'd be happy-enough having as a legacy.
@@Roxor128 That works right until the code review is rejected because it wasn't a one line Band-Aid with no comments. There's nothing quite like that feeling.
@@arthurmoore9488 Damned if you do, damned if you don't!
@@Roxor128 I like your original comment !
I've personally always enjoyed the design of the Windows formatter, It's simple yet gives me all options I want the majority of the time I need to format something. Thank you, Dave!
for real, this interface is ten times better than anything Microsoft's professional UI designers have ever done!
It's not flashy, but it does everything I want it to do and is small/easy to use. Compare this to the current windows 10 UI where everything is hidden behind text links which EVENTUALLY lead you to the old windows XP system tools. Bruh
You've enjoyed the design of the windows formatter?.....you need to get a life!
Only thing that would make it better would be a mod to remove his limit. It's definitely doable x86 assembly programming isn't exactly easy but it isn't rocket science either. Yet no one seems to want to touch it.
I can listen to this guy for hours without even getting bored...well done sir!
Thanks for the kind words! That means a lot!
same here
The other guy that has this property is probably Technoblade
Yes, a fascinating and instructive channel.
@@rachit7645 I am so sorry.
I was the QA lead of the DOS\Windows base team from 1987-1997, FAT32 was my last major accomplishment at Microsoft before I retired early because of health reasons. The developer who designed FAT32 died in 2008. I remember the day we handed off the completed FAT32 driver after it passed all of our tests to the NT group and it is still functioning in Windows 10. It was QA department fault for not reporting the problem of 32GB limit and fighting for a change. I found design time QA was most important In operating system development. We won control of MS-DOS 5 from IBM because of of design time QA suggestions I made during DOS 4. Both involved choices we made different than IBM in MS-DOS setup and disk caching smartdrv.sys. At least there was a work around artificial 32GB limit, 3rd party tools or venders pre-formating larger FAT32 drives so they would work.
I remember buying a 640gb western digital external hard drive that was FAT32 from the factory. was good because it would work with our tv set top box to record tv shows ect but I did end up formatting it into NTFS eventually when i realised that some of the games i was trying to install were failing because of the 4gb file size limit, but i did loose support with the recorder after that.
Another option for Microsoft would have been to support file systems used by Linux which didn't have this limitation but at this time it was viewed by Microsoft as a competitor. They've since made contributions to the different distributions.
This man singlehandedly made 32 gigabyte the standard.
and the decision he made was multiplied by 1000 and double it for good measure. what a Lad
It's cool isn't it? I knew somebody, possibly a whole department made that seemingly arbitrary decision but it was this one guy, who now we can see on youtube and even talk with him.
@@MrGuliton don't you know? That's a basic engineering rule in all fields ;-)
For this reason i still have A LOT of 32gb sticks for old devices .... it would be a lot better for them to support more but 32gb seems to be the hassle free silverline
@@fredtaylor9792 That's the best part - people will get furious over some stuff, concoct these "logical conspiracies, I mean it's all right there for everyone to see", and spit venom towards all the corrupt individuals who have clearly chosen to participate in making this dude's life hell because of an obviously greed-driven, monopolistic, anti-consumer, bureaucratic decision...
...but, it was actually just this really nice guy that thought he was working on a temporary piece of a project, who thought he was making a reasonably forward leaning decision(took the biggest card on the market, multiplied its capacity by 1000, and doubled that) for the purpose of the project. And, because this is how humans work, the temporary chunk ended up becoming permanent, leaving us with this somewhat arbitrary limitation. And, that's literally the "reason" why we've ended up here, cuz humans gonna human; not because Microsoft was trying to squeeze an extra 0.01% of margin out of their IP at consumer expense.
The x86 instruction set was also a quick short term spec someone at Intel came up with in order ship the 8088 chip, which itself was a stop gap until they got around to shipping the "real" chip. 40 years later that "proper" chip never shipped.
They did ship a few different replacement ISAs... but none of them ever replaced x86.
The 68K was a was better CPU but time to market was the issue. Intel hacked a solution to get it out the door and we had to suffer with that decision to this day!
I mean they tried twice (soon to be thrice)., y but the replacement never released it
Itanium was supposed to be that chip, then AMD x64 came along...
@@csuporjif only Microsoft finds out no one likes xml
I love this. I have lazily wondered about the 32GB limit in the past and just concluded that it must make sense in a way I didn't understand. And there it is: 1000x the largest memory card the developer could get, times two for good measure. There's just no arguing with that. Please do keep making these videos; I love these first-hand accounts concerning the development of the OS's I've been using since the first time I turned on a computer, approximately 35 years ago.
Glad you've liked them, if there are areas you're interested in let me know!
@@DavesGarage I would be interested in anything that, as an OS user, you tend to take for granted but incorporates discrete decisions and took solid work to make work. Which, basically, is everything of course. (I'm in software development myself, so I know that making it look obvious and preventing angry phone calls is half the work.)
Yeah, Dave, I want to know who thought fast start up was a good idea. Especially since it was instituted right around the time SSD boot drives were becoming popular, thereby negating any possible advantage fast start up might have had.
Hibernation in general is flaky and unreliable, and to make it the default when shutting down windows is utterly ridiculous.
Not that I expect you to have an answer for this one since you were likely long gone when this came to pass.
@@DavesGarageyou weren't asking me and I'm a bit late BUT... Id be interested in a technical deep dive into the different sleep states, and why windows has such a hard time properly going into and out of sleep states on certain laptops.... Leading to some unnecessary backpack heat and a post all nighter pre-presentation panic attack as you fish out a lifeless paperweight that once contained your dissertation... Any chance to hear you talk about bios/uefi and startup/shutdown mechanisms is extremely fascinating!!
Clever mug shot at the end for the time elapsed.
They say "never meet your heroes." For you, I think I'd make an exception. As often as I've used the Format dialog over various Windows versions, it's never failed me. Thanks for that.
Dude, the UI is perfect. Modern UI stuff is so unintuitive. I thought an app had lost a feature after a UI update until my sister showed me how to do it months later
I think if I designed it it'd be pretty similar. Different layout, same options. Just one dialog box.
I really like UI that are built with 2 flavors:
-"Simple" form for all users
-"Advanced" with all options exposed
"Simplicity is perfection" that's what I learned in class and life.
The new windows panels are horrific. They're a little bit prettier but system settings and maintenance should be ways to use, not pretty. Windows 10 maintenance has been a massive leap backwards for me. Something as simple as getting to advanced mouse options or sound settings should be trivial...
@@mattbrewerton6884 for me, the beauty of old control panel is that you see high-level categories, but as you need, you get to low-level settings in just two or three clicks reading/looking just one or two options/icons, and of course, the homogeneity of ui
Your stories are so interesting especially to those of us who had to work with early versions of Windows. Brings back painful memories of Nt servers back in the 90s . Dave you are a legend.
So you wrote Task Manager and the format window: the only two thing that works on Windows... Great!
@@fernandomaroli8481 not the creator but the Windows implementation
@@fernandomaroli8481 The zip-file module fooled me years ago with many small files. A customer couldn't see all the files in a zip i created, because the windows implementation had an error. With winrar/winzip or 7zip it worked perfectly.
I like your original comment !
@@fernandomaroli8481 7zip ≠ Dave.
@@fernandomaroli8481 The inventor of the zip format was Phil Katz. It's signed in every zip file: He used his own initials as the file identifier. That's why the first two bytes of every zip file say 'PK'.
Dave, your channel is absolutely wonderful. There is a whole generation of guys/gals that have just been dying to have the curtain behind Windows history pulled back a few inches for a peek inside. And the way you do it is just awesome... Love your candor. I'm soooo glad you've done this for us!
It is just amazing that this simple thing written 25 years ago is still lurking in the shadows untouched.
The magic of reuse the same base code over the years. Even today you have limitations of msdos era!
Great interface work! All the options could be selected and viewed in a single window - what a concept! No wonder this disk format UI panel has been around unchanged for so long, and will survive into the years ahead.
@@Anticorriente "Reuse" makes it sound like they started over and used old parts, that worked, again in the new version. But it's more like they've never updated anything and just keep adding features on top of old sh*t.
I like that though. If something doesn't need fixing, then leave it be is something I like to stick to. And something I have learned from personal experience.
It reminds me of when I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade my vehicles lighting to LED... They ended up flickering, being too cool to remove moisture, going bad and generally looking tacky.
I went back to incandesent and never looked back.
@@dancoulson6579 that really shouldn't be a problem. Bad wiring design of the car mfr or the LED mfr. I suspect the latter the more I think about it. Lots of cheap, unreliable products out there.
For outside indicator lights like tail and stop lights, there can be a problem though with the position and light beam direction not in tune with the plastic reflective surface.
Sir, if your work has lasted 20 years, and served Billions of times dare i say your minimalist yet functional UI Style is appreciated.
I for one used it a hundred times or two and unless there was a hardware failure, your work got the job done time after Time from XP all the way to 10
Just discovered your channel. I'm a mainframer turned Windows programmer. To hear the creator of these tools we've used for 25-30 years . . . . . . it's a bit like hearing God discuss the travails of creating the Universe. :-) Great fun. Enjoyed all so far.
Cool! What mainframe? System/360 or PDP or what did you work on? Do you dream in JCL?
Learned a new word today: travail
Well... Hello! We finally met) Back in the days I was using fat32 to share file between Linux and Windows. I used to create partitions and disks under Linux. I was really surprised when tryed it under Windows. Thanks to you)
Anecdotes about his work at Microsoft makes this channel one of my new favorites
Top 10 most anticipated youtuber apology videos
fr tho, this is very cool. thanks for sharing this.
Love the way you tell these stories, it's very entertaining. Can't wait for the next.
Thanks, glad you enjoy them!
Dave, you're an awesome engineer. The way you explain things is clear, simple, and to the point.
Doesn't take a genius to understand the thought process or decision making you communicate, just a cursory knowledge of how these systems work. It's extremely refreshing.
He's just full of information and the way he talks fast and teaches so much things in a short period of time is just amazing. Such a brilliant mind.
Thanks for that explanation.
The place where this limit has really come to bite people is when a novice is trying to set up a Raspberry Pi. For those who don't already know, a Pi's boot loader must be on a FAT file system, even though Linux itself uses other file systems (most commonly, one of the ext variants).
Today, there are apps for Windows and macOS that will prepare an SD card with everything set up the way a Pi expects it, so the issue is moot today.
But a year or so ago, the most common way to set up a new Pi was to format the SD card as FAT and copy a package called "Noobs" onto it. A Pi would boot that and present a menu you could use to dynamically repartition the card and install the operating system of your choice.
This worked great for SD cards of 32GB or less. For a 64GB card, however, Windows users couldn't format the card easily. They needed to use the command-line formatter or a different operating system (e.g. another Linux system or a Mac).
Of course, experienced users didn't bother with Noobs at all. It was easier to download a full card image file containing the FAT boot partition and an ext partition with Linux pre-loaded. Just use a binary image copier tool to copy it to an SD card of any size. On the first bootup, the system would resize the ext partition to fill all the remaining space on the ext card without you caring about the rest.
But it's all moot today, because the Raspberry Pi people now provide a much more convenient tool for installing OS images onto SD cards.
I'm fascinated by these inner working videos. Tools I've been using since childhood and the guy who made them (or participated in the development). It's so satisfying. I'm fine with multipart and long videos cos I never get tired of those stories.
I agree with this. I think it’s great to put a face to the six-letter name and to learn about design decisions and compromises when developing tools or subsystems. Never gets boring! Thanks much for these videos.
Thanks for the UI, it's spot on reliable, fast and works everytime it needed.
Loved the little Canadian nostalgia at the end. Thanks for the great content again Dave!
My pleasure!
I love the coffee cup voiceover. It's product placement AND clever audio edit in one! 😁
BTW - I too am on 'Team Dave' when it comes to physical controls in cars. A moving cars is no place for nested menu controls!
The important stuff in my Nissan Pathfinder are physical buttons, the stereo, heat and air, and the cruise control. That's about all I do. Sometimes I'll change the channel on the Sirius-XM on the touch screen. There are buttons, but I never learned them.
Thank you so much for your contributions to Windows! To this day, we are still using your works!
Thansk! That's what amazes me, so much of my code from 25 years ago is still in there!
@@DavesGarage Just out of curiosity, do you remember where it is in the source tree? I want to find the format tool in the XP source code leak. [edited for clarification]
😂❤wonderful writing and dry delivery, Dave. In addition to the deep dive tech weeds. Thanks!🎉
I love your stories! Just found your channel and I can’t stop watching. Coming from an IT guy, this is some of the most compelling and interesting content on UA-cam. Please keep ‘em coming! :)
Welcome aboard! Glad you found it!
Legendo! Sve pohvale za kanal. Od detinjstva sam koristio MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP, 7, 10 and now 11.
Dave, you really deserve more subs!
Thanks! Please share it with anyone you think would be interested in this stuff, it's pretty niche!
Yes, his house needs another extension! :)
@@iddn Forget the house, I need more room to park cars! :-)
@@DavesGarage I would love to see more videos on your cars!
@@DavesGarage yes, let's pop the hood on the ubiquitous Bosch "CAN Bus" design and troubleshhoot crazy modules and managed failure modes 👍
I work at a company that makes LiDAR systems. We use FAT32 formatted storage on our systems. Our new customers have no end of trouble because they think they can just format in Windows native utility. (Our disks we supply are 256gb minimum, so no hope of native fat32). Now I find out all the woe is due to one of my favorite youtubers!! haha
I remember another weakness of the Format dialogue, at least in Windows XP, was that it wouldn't format 720k floppy disks! I figured it was such a small use case by then that it had been overlooked, and that was the first time I ever used the command line for anything. (I had a bunch of disks given to me for free and they were useful for shuffling homework to and from school before I could afford a USB drive). I love how long code survives in various places, it's always astonishing to see bits that haven't changed in decades shipped with brand new PCs. Love the channel :)
I have a book that says u could format that size floppy disk at least in DOS, but it did require switches and typing some numbers.. I had few extra floppy disks from Amiga 500 days, but it was a bit too cumbersome indeed to format them..
@@Kimmobiino those were only 1.44 "megabytes". Single-sided 3.5" floppy was 720 "kilobytes". (In quotes because I don't remember off the top of my head if those sizes are really Mebibytes and Kibibytes.
Back in the day I would cut open a tab on the floppy sleeve to mark the floppy as double sidded. The magnetic media manufacturers didn't actually produce single sided media. Just a filled or unfilled spot on the sleeve told the drive if it was single or double sidded.
1.44MB = High Density (double sided), the "standard" (in the 90s and later anyway) PC disks
720KB = Double Density (double sided), used by the Amiga and earlier PCs (though the Amiga could fit either 880KB or 901KB onto one of these because it formatted the disks differently from MS-DOS and Windows)
Single sided disks were even earlier and held only 360-400KB.
Yes it will! In fact I keep a Windows XP box specifically for that purpose!
That pro-tip stunned me! It explains why, at the time of drives going beyond the limit, I would experience format failures.. but also successes via command line! I don't think I realised this! That said, having worked with devs and engineers for years + big biz - I am not totally surprised! Thanks Dave!
So cool to see someone like you making youtube videos
I would like to see a video about disk formatting, what it is, what does it do, the difference between full and quick format… and I now you wouldn’t disappoint us making one. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. As a future engineer, this kind of content is so helpful.
"Sitting on the front steps for 20 years..." Yes, Dave is a lot of fun to listen too. Thanks for another great video!
Sending a video from the pickup truck in case a quick get away was in need indeed !
The algorithm has a funny sense of humour promoting this video to me days after I struggled to format a 128gb microSD card to Fat32 for 3DS homebrew.
this.
It is so strange (in a good way) to learn about these projects you had over at MS in the 90s. Growing up with MS-DOS, Win 3.1 and further 95. This is a real story time for me. You made a lot of the relevant tools in WIndows, it's so fun to learn about what the thoughts were, behind every decision.
Wow thanks. I finally understand the choice of format options I've been confronted with for decades!
Thank you for sharing this. I understand that when the product need to be shipped, temporary become permanent. It's too often the norm.
I think that the UI and the backend should have allowed to use the full FAT32 capability. A simple warning to the user over 32G may have done the job. In the early 2000s I was working on a mp3 player projet using an hard drive. Since most mp3 file was around 4MB, there was not much waste of data on 80GB or 160GB FAT32 partitioned drives. I had coded the FAT32 reader in assembly language and I was able to read up to 2TB since we were using MBR at that time. Further more, the NTFS specification was proprietary and the only option accessible for me at time was to port the read only NTFS driver that was available for Linux to my MCU. It required too many effort in the timeframe I had. At the end I wrote my own format program that calculate and write sectors directly to the disk because fmifs.dll (the Windows format backend) was refusing to format over 32GB in FAT32. The software was to be distributed with the player. I always hated this kind of the decision from MS and many nore. I switched to a more permissive operating system for almost 10 years now and for good.
A common concept in chinese ... "差不多" Cha Bu Duo -- EG " Good Enough" =P - Thank you for your service as format both GUI has worked with no issues for me =P Appreciate the entertainment and insider look. Subbed and Liked -- 11months after you published this :P
Even in win10 is the format dialog same as in xp times. 1h Work for the eternity
They'll probably change it eventually, as they seem obsessed with making things in Win10 harder to use than they were before.
@@alexatkin welcome to win10, where our design goal is to turn your computer into an android/iphone. Power users be damned.
@@ozziegggLet’s not forget about Windows 8 too. Literally replaced the start menu with some “start screen” that bogged down the entire display.
@@kurnma3776 because its supposed to be for tablet, people had great time with it if you have touch screen display
@@darrinito touchscreen laptops (or tablets with attachable keyboards) are useful for watching videos or browsing the web in the bed, or for drawing. You really can't do those things comfortably with a mouse.
Dave, you might actually be my favourite UA-camr; all the likes are yours, which is not something I generally give to anybody! 😊
You're a gripping storyteller Dave, cool history.
Thanks!
My first viewing of any of your videos. I have not gone through the over 1300 comments on this one to see if anyone else recognized it but I was thrilled at The Friendly Giant homage ending! Childhood memories awakened.
As usual, another completely awesome video. I love these bits of the arcane. I love it more because I've used the format app thousands of times over the last 30 years and now I know the guy that wrote it!
In the early 80's I was head of a very small experimental team developing Computer Based Training (CBT) for a Fortune 100 company. We had developed a program under DOS 3/3.1, but this was so early in the IBM PC world that most offices only had single floppy PC's (can you imagine?!), and since the OS had to be on the same floppy as the program we had to format the floppies with the /S option to leave room on the floppy for the user to SYS it since we couldn't distribute the OS. When DOS 4 came out we migrated to it quickly and continued our normal distribution. However, within days of shipping the first copies sent out with floppies formatted with /S under DOS 4, we got calls saying the floppies didn't work! Long story short, the initial release of DOS 4 (done by IBM, not Microsoft) had failed to update the /S option to allocate enough of the floppy for the larger OS, so when the user SYS'd the floppy, part of our program was overwritten. It took several hours on the phone with IBM (who only took my call because I was with a corporation with an equally impressive three capital letter name) to explain, get transferred, explain again, get transferred again, and explain again before someone that understood what I was saying was the problem understood. We got an updated version of DOS 4 within a week, and IBM gave up on trying to deal with DOS with version 4.1 that came out shortly thereafter.
I marvel at the strides we made in storage. The 10MB HardCards were awesome, then I thought I died and went to heaven when I bought my 320MB Quantum drives (for about $500 at the time). Now 8GB MicroSD cards are throwaway items. Thanks for the inside look at the operating system and tools. Fascinating stuff! It's like a true version of Halt and Catch Fire!
Indeed! I remember seeing my first hard drive, a 10M Commodore 9060 that appears as a ton of floppies to the system!
Was already subbed from previous content, but I'm so here for this. Legit laughed out loud with the Simpsons-esque coffee cup over the mouth gag. Well done.
Thanks for catching the original reference! That was their Superbowl episode I believe...
Man, I wish I could have met Dave when I was younger. I became a certified computer tech when I was 14 .. 23 years ago. My uncle was in military intelligence and started me with a real old computer that I can't remember the name of, but after I learned the insides of it he 'upgraded' me to a Tandy 😂 (Edit: 23 yrs exp and Dave always teaches me a thing or two that never occurred to me for whatever reason, this channel is a true blessing. I will never forget to give him his well earned likes!!)
You managed to not only solve the age old question but also nullify years of "understanding". Thanks for the content
I'm triggered by the fact that "Capacity:" has a colon while the other labels don't! For those without a UI background, as a rule of thumb, never include colons in your labels or titles. This goes for headings in Word documents as well.
Amazingly I've never noticed until now!
@ian: What is the rationale of never including a colon after the labels?
@@todortodorov940 You already have a marked field right after it (or linebreak in case of word documents). It appears less cluttered and simpler. And just looks better.
@@maze42d So it is purely visual consideration. I would have thought that from grammatical perspective it's better to have the colon. For example, "Print orientation: *Landscape*", except that in this sentence the word *Landscape* is a drop-down, so you can choose other options.
Don't know if this is fixed for all locales or only German, but I have colons everywhere. Thank God!
Absolutely fascinating. Thanks for sharing that story!
Hi Dave! Would love to see some war stories about the registry and its inner workings, or perhaps windows explorer? Cheers!
read before Windows Registry was to go away once
centrally stored system registry is so efficient... it's made of distincts hives - Good luck phasing out all of it
😉
I initially had a hard time understanding Registry and moving to it from INI files. Yep, I go that far back as a technician.
The main challenge was knowing where the elements were and what they did.
@@glasser2819 what many probably don't realize is that the hives are individual files. Like Current User is the DAT file at the root of your user profile folder.
@@danman32 yeah, under sys32\config right?
Dude, the format UI isn't fancy, but it _is_ elegant. Take a bow, sir.
11:14 Nice editing trick :D almost seemless
Thanks! I thought it'd be cute since I didn't know how long it would be edited at that point...
Seamless?? I watched 2 times to understand that something happened
@@ItaloLoureiro It's not supposed to be seamless, it's supposed to be obvious, that's the joke :-)
@@DavesGarage nailed it :)
I did not notice, untill I read your comment, at first i thought it was a cup with thumbs up, as to say like the video in a subtle non-verbal way
I love this kind of inside details from the very man who put them there.
I wish we got more of it from other fields.
Thanks for the insight and for sharing your thought process. You are in good company with your "temporary solution". Vinton G. Cerf comes to mind with his "32 bit is enough for a small military test network" for IPv4. Hard to prevent such things since they seem so logical at the time.
I love the way the format manager and task manager look. You get good data displayed in an orderly fashion
I'm amazed at how many things you build.
My first HDD was a 3.5" 5400 rpm ~1000 MB drive. I've seen 2 TB microSD cards the size of half a stamp. Tough to prepare (or imagine) for limits in that range (or larger). For you're diligence to simplicity, I salute you! (I've used you're GUI for formatting, well since DOS and Hercules).
Very interesting stories. It's fascinating seeing and listening to the guy who created pieces of software nearly everyone in the world has and continues to use multiple times over many years/decades.. and he describes and explains everything in great detail whilst keeping it very interesting... Great channel
The more i watch your videos the more i see you as a legend. That dialog is legendary. I don't think there is a person that ever used a PC that didn't see that disk format dialog at least once in his life. Sometimes you love it, it works out of the box, and sometimes it screws you up and you hate it. It all dependent on device and choices for formatting i was choosing at that given point in time. Nevertheless you are a legend :)
You did a great job on the UI.
It's a travesty that today's UI designers think everything needs to be a huge button with tons of white space around it. Take Steam for example. It used to be a very good program with a great, user friendly UI that was full of information and took up little screen space. Today, it's massive, takes up half your screen and shows LESS information even though it uses 5x more screen space. We're going backwards as far as user interfaces are concerned.
I find it infuriating. Everything seems to be dumbed down and made for babies or blind people. Some UIs are five times bigger, or more, than they need to be. Backup software that I need to maximize on my 4K screen just so I can properly navigate a folder tree is ridiculous. I want more pixels so I have more space, but what seems to be happening is that I need more pixels to be able to fit the same stuff as I used to be able to on a smaller screen, because the stuff is getting bigger.
I maintained and sometimes enhanced and customised operating system software for IBM mainframe computers. My users were applications programmers. One of my projects was to design menus for common tasks. I provided sensible defaults, and remembered their individual choices.
And each task within the menu structure solicited all relevant information on one page.
Since I regularly saw my users around the office, and got to talk to them, I was sure that they were happy.
In summary, FAT was getting to FAT for FATter partitions
what is worse than fat-shaming? ... ntfs-shaming! *ba dum tss*
too*
@@donniecapobianco8794 we need to perform a backup of the backup in case the backup gets corrupted ! Shaming how long the process took !
Thanks for making it so easy for me to format my drives when I was 10 years old.
Dave's Garage, however many of these stories of yours you have, you can keep going. I will continue watching them, and I _do_ want to watch them.
You are a wealth of understanding. Questions I never thought to ask! Thank you!
About exFAT licensing: Microsoft made the exFAT-Specification publicly available and licensed at least for the Linux kernel. There is an implentation released in Kernel 5.4. So if you're build something upon the Linux Kernel, you'll be out of this dilemma. Everywhere else, you're still need a license.
Windows should just start supporting more file systems. They are starting to embrace Linux which is awesome. NTFS is so dated, imagine being able to habe your c: drive be ext4 or btrfs!
@@MaxUgly NTFS is probably just there for the single reason of supporting Bitlocker, which IIRC only work on that format.
There would also need some work on symlink support in order to bring those new format into the system, I think.
@@FlameRat_YehLon Windows already makes use of hard and symlinks. Hard links require no special support from the file system itself. Not allowing hardlinks in FAT is more of a safeguard than a technical limitation. ext* and btrfs does support symlinks.
RE licensing. I thought that had to be the case. Drones supported EXFat for years, and their code is based on Linux
Doesn't Android also natively support ExFAT as well?
@@danman32 android is based on Linux as well. Although I think, smartphone vendors have licensed by their own and use their own implementation.
Thanks Dave. I'm not a programming genius like you are, but after 15 years of owning a computer shop, I guess I've formatted quite a few drives and repaired/reloaded a few thousands times the MS Windows. You, sir, are a legend!
On a historical note, I don't know if this is an all-time record, but would you believe our local FM radio station here in the N GA mountains is still operating on an automation program called "Systemation" that runs on DOS 6.22? It's true. I'll not mention the station ID so as not to embarrass them. But their hard drive finally ground to a halt last week after 24 years of constant spinning. I dug around my bone yard for a 3.5" floppy and got a replacement IDE drive setup, then copied files from a backup CD; fixed a batch file error to get the sound card drivers loaded. Good news, they're back in business.
Love this behind the scenes windows stuff. Would love to see a video giving an overview of how windows worked as a whole system.
those stories were needed back in 90's to give a insight but thank you anyway
Even though I haven't used a Windows system regularly since 2000 Pro I definitely find these videos interesting. Keep em coming!
Really enjoying these videos. Thanks for your insights and sharing your thoughts from the past. Hindsight is always 20/20
I think the UI spot on. This is occasionally used tool where I want to see a single window with clear and obvious inputs and a button at the bottom to make it happen. After all, I wouldn't go into a hardware store and buy a hammer for its looks! :-)
We buy the hammer to hit any key to continue !
Keep on bringing the heat Dave, love your show my dude!
I'm a fan of the "SD Memory Card Formatter" tool from the SD Association - if you're goofing around with formatting SD cards, this thing picks the correct file system parameters so your card will work the way it ought to.
Not sure if the latest version can do it, but SDFormatter 4.0 can perform a flash erase which can help restore lost performance.
Just found this series and I'm loving it! I unknowingly cursed your name for years. :) I did a bunch of Android multimedia stuff around when 64GB cards/drives started coming out. At the time most Android devices could read/write FAT, but not exFAT. Even worse, most Android devices prompted the user to reformat the exFAT drives as FAT. I don't know how many users I sent RidgeCorp's FAT32 format util too.
I think BTRFS (which Linux natively supports, and you can install a driver on Windows for) is the only file system that fixes cluster slack. The FATs have cluster slack. NTFS has it. EXT2/3/4 have it too. BTRFS, however, allows multiple small files to sit in a single cluster.
You make me proud to be a fellow autist. Thank you for these nuggets of history... wouldn't be without them!
I remember back when drives had a defect list you had to enter into the BIOS so the computer knew to skip over those areas. How far we've come.
Yes! Right on the label!
RLFM HDD platers had to be "Aligned" on each system so data could be available sequentially as disk was spinning -Then defragmenting came in fashion
😉
It all started with a video suggestion from UA-cam but didn’t think that your videos have such great content. Good job, Dave,
I like the uniform UI-style of the late 90s so much more than ever changing new styles which seem be optmized for smartphones no matter if that is even a use case. It's so annoying that with every update stuff gets moved around, renamed or completely removed for no apparent reason. And yes indeed now where I'm getting older, I've learned to value good old physical buttons and switches and I'm much more open and respectful to old ideas and solutions. New is not always better and most things simply can't be improved indefinitely in a reasonable manner.
get a Nokia then
@@sas408 This was about UIs on PCs getting optimized for smartphones, not about phones. Maybe actually watch the video understand the context...
Loved to hear that story. makes so much sense to me. keep up the inside stories
I’d love to see a video on your thoughts and feelings about Linux in this same era
But back then (mid-90s) Linux was kind of grim, just RedHat and a couple of other distros. Now it's cool, but was pretty new back then! I did contribute a piece of small code way back though,. Now I love WSL, it's the way to go!
@@DavesGarage speaking of, what are your thoughts on the state of Windows Package Manager?
@@DavesGarage Linux subsystem for Windows
Dave, I share your hard knob preference which reflects in keeping the old car and in the UI design for formatting partitions! In addition to that I'd like to thank for the complete and understable explanation how the dialogue came to be. I like the high density of that posting as well as measured in information divided by the run-time of your video. Thank you.
Spent 3 hours on Christmas eve stuck at work trying to do a software update on a car's infotainment system which refused to correctly read an exfat 64gb USB stick. I just assumed formatting it to fat32 wasn't possible since the windows dialogue didn't allow it. Eventually found a 32GB stick which would work. Damn you Dave and your arbitrary decisions!!!
when all else fails use the windows management console/disk management snapin and manually set the size and format it as 32 gigs or less.
or learn how to use disk part :D
@@GoogleDoesEvil the car probably doesn't have drivers to read NTFS.
I'm sure that back before exFAT was a thing I used to have some piece of third party Windows software that let me format huge drives as FAT32.
My Jeep will ONLY read thumb drives formatted Fat32. I use it on a 64 Gig thumb drive.... but at least I get to listen to all of my favorite songs again :)
Thoroughly enjoyed this episode Dave! Yeah it’s hard to look back and realize “oh shoot I should have changed that.”
Very interesting video! I'm wondering however why FAT32 does not use the top 4 bits of the FAT table entries (thus limited to maximum of 2^28 clusters), thus it's really "FAT28" only. I learnt this surprising fact (well, it was for me) when I wrote a FAT32 "driver" for Commodore 64 (yes, I know ...).
Not sure how I ended up here, but thank you for your contributions to humanity.
9:45 Unfortunately, one of the recent Windows 10 releases actively prevent you from using CLI tools to format a large memory card as FAT32. Both format and diskpart are incapable of doing so. As far as I'm aware, using a third-party utility (or using macOS/Linux) is the only option available now.
That is, if you want a file system that only supports files up to 4 GB in size. It's pain, so I just don't use FAT32
@@chlorobyte_projects Not all devices support exFAT or NTFS. Older digital cameras, game consoles, media players, and retro PCs all support large drives but often cannot support modern filesystems.
@@Spectere Yes, but the corollary is that these older devices (I have many) don't *_accept_* a large format memory card anyway, regardless of filesystem, so it's pretty much a null argument in most use cases.
@@Blitterbug I never said that it wasn't a niche thing, but it does affect me. I have several devices that I still use regularly (my iPod classic, Xbox 360, and vintage 1998 retro PC) that will support both large drives and large filesystems, but do _not_ support exFAT. Not everything is subject to the generational rift between extended SD card formats-retrofits and devices that support other flash formats (such as CompactFlash or the USB mass storage support on Windows 98 and the Xbox 360) have long since been able to exceed that 32GB limit without the ability to natively support newer filesystems.
Also, just because a device supports exFAT doesn't mean that it's the right option. It doesn't take much searching to find reports of people who wound up with data loss and corruption due to the buggy exFAT driver in the Nintendo Switch. If it were one or two reports I'd chalk it down to a few people using cheap flash cards, but it's so bad that using RetroArch on a modded Switch, or even playing enough Pokémon Sword/Shield on an unmodded console, is basically a death sentence for your data.
Still, this is all a very moot point. All I did with my original comment was point out that a workaround that Dave himself brought up in the video (at the given timestamp) is no longer possible in newer versions of Windows. I'm all for making it a slight inconvenience, as I've borne witness to several cursed FAT32 Windows XP installs back in the day, but removing the ability to do it entirely is just silly and largely pointless.
@@Spectere Cool
Hindsite being 2020, I wish that I was working along with you in those days. I'm sure that the frustrations would have been worth it!