Why iPadOS Lacks a Calculator and Windows NT’s Formatting UI Has Stayed Unchanged for 30 Years

iPadOS calculator omission

When iPadOS was first released, Apple engineers initially tried to copy the iPhone calculator app to the iPad. Steve Jobs judged that the UI would look awkward on the larger screen and instructed the product team either to redesign the calculator or to omit it. The team chose the latter, so iPadOS ships without a pre‑installed calculator and users must obtain one from the App Store.

Windows NT disk‑formatting UI legacy

In 1994, Microsoft engineer Dave W. Plummer—known for work on Windows Pinball, the Windows calculator, ZIP extraction, and product activation—was asked to create a user interface for the Disk Management tool in Windows NT. At that time Microsoft was porting large portions of Windows 95 code to the NT kernel, and the two operating systems used different file‑system formats (FAT, NTFS, etc.). Plummer listed every option a user might need when formatting a volume, including:

File‑system type (FAT, NTFS, etc.)

Volume label

Cluster (allocation unit) size

Compression flag

Encryption flag

Other advanced attributes

Using Visual C++ 2.0 and the resource editor, he built a dialog that presented those options in roughly the order a user would select them. The UI was intentionally simple and “good enough” for immediate use; Plummer acknowledged that it was not elegant, but it satisfied the functional requirement.

The resulting dialog has remained virtually unchanged for three decades and is still present in modern versions of Windows. An additional artifact of the original design is the arbitrary 32 GB limit on FAT volumes, a decision made during that early implementation that has persisted as a compatibility constraint.

Both cases illustrate how early product decisions—driven by aesthetic concerns at Apple and a “good enough” engineering mindset at Microsoft—can become long‑lasting defaults in software ecosystems.

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