Let's say you are a software developer with a huge list of tasks. One of them was to create an interface for formatting storage drives. You might think to tidy everything up and clean it up for the final release. What is unexpected is that it will continue to be used exactly as it is, unchanged, for 30 years.

Welcome to the world of Dave Plummer, creator of many parts of Windows.

Plummer recalls on Twitter his work creating the Windows NT formatting options dialog box, but this is not the first time he recalls his earlier accomplishments, from which we learn that he created the Task Manager and implemented Zip file Back in 1994, Plummer and the rest of the team were busy porting the Windows 95 code for the graphical user interface to Windows NT 4.0, which had not yet been released.

In one of his tweets, Plummer recalls that "on a rainy Thursday morning," he picked up a pen and paper and wrote out everything he needed for the NT formatting options. He then did some simple coding and created a rough user interface that he thought would be a temporary solution.

But that "temporary" turned into 30 years. Even the lack of consistent use of colons in field headings is still intact! Of course, it all works perfectly, but it certainly isn't pretty.

I have very little creativity when it comes to coding a clean interface. So I don't mean to criticize his work at all, but I can at least make fun of the fact that the constant title gets a colon, but nothing else!

Talking about formatting, have you ever wondered why hard drive capacity was limited to a maximum of 32 GB at the time: "We have decided to limit the format size of FAT volumes to 32 GB. This limitation was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that haunted us as a permanent side effect"

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially when it comes to making simple choices in a tremendously huge software project, but I don't think we can be too harsh on Mr. Plummer. [Windows has undergone some pretty big changes over the years, but it's kind of nice to see that they are still using the design of something as old as Google, Java, and USB ports.