@davepl1968 This is exactly like I imagined that most of Windows was designed...

@thomas_entner It wasn't, most of it was very well thought out. It's not fair to extrapolate from an edge case like this to the rest of the product, and that's kinda the point of the story.

@davepl1968 Broken gets fixed but shoddy is forever.

@bl0rq You probably don't like the Beatles.

@davepl1968 Wow, you'd think someone would have at least made the use of colons consistent some time in the last 30 years!

@DavidEGrayson Yeah, I'll see if I can get someone to open a bug on that one :-)

@davepl1968 Shame they haven't improved it in 30 years. There are many scenarios where partitioning and formatting are broken in the Windows UI. Here for example, it is impossible to recover this USB flash drive's capacity and reformat it. Want to change MBR to GPT, nope. Extend nope. Shrink

@PassMarkInc It's always bugged me that you sometimes need to break out DISKPART.EXE to do things that UI cannot...

@davepl1968 I knew it! Aargh this makes me so mad. Thanks for sharing.

@LzyIndTky But why? If it were a bad thing, I'd think they'd have changed it by now...

@davepl1968 to this day it won't allow formatting a 256gb usb stick with fat32 😂

@minusfortynine 256K clusters would mean every single MP3 file took 256K, which would be pretty inefficient. So at some point, it becomes "You shouldn't do that..." But it's arbitrary, perhaps a warning might have been better, but it would be a scary and obscure warning!

@davepl1968 is the little grey rectangle at the bottom, above the buttons, intentional?

@dmvjs I think that's the progress bar you're seeing.

@davepl1968 amazing, and also amazing it’s still in use to this day

@davepl1968 And Microsoft hasn’t updated it since then 😆

@davepl1968 Another great Dave story. Yours have always been some of the most ironic and memorable! 🤣

@davepl1968 Microsoft really needs improve it's disk management We are still have to use clonezilla or disk part and such

@davepl1968 Still nice of you to bless us with 32GB. Quite a lot in -94

@davepl1968 @tom_forsyth The corollary to this is that it's OK if leaf functions aren't perfect. If we try to get everything right, we won't ship anything at all, which kills companies and doesn't serve anyone. Knowing and accepting what is "good enough" is the crucial skill to develop!

@davepl1968 But that 32GB limit was in place prior to the UI right?

@davepl1968 Awesome story. Thanks for sharing !

@davepl1968 Dave, do you know who wrote this one? I remember wishing this could be a resizable window back when I worked on Windows, so I could better read my Path variable. Wonder if it's been updated.

@davepl1968 Did you write the CharacterMap app the day after? 😂

@davepl1968 @dgackey That'll teach you not to colour one of the boxes virulent purple.