Second Hand Smoke - DirectX - Better than NT?
Inspired by my old friend, Ken Nicholson at SGI, a romp through history with some interesting connections to Quake, Nvidia, and Linux.
Monday 17 January was Martin Luther King Day in the US, a national holiday.
NT And FAT32
Three day weekends. A chance to get away from work for an extra day. It's like a mini-vacation. You can spend the weekend doing whatever you want or you can use the time to do something that you've been promising yourself you'd get around to. Like upgrading that old hard drive.
With disk drives ballooning in size every week, you can now pop down to your local CompUSA and get a gigantic 20 Gigabyte drive for under $200. Then
Just take it home and swap out one of those rusty old 2 Gig jobs. So easy, right?
Well, not so fast. Will you be formatting that drive with FAT16 partitions so that it is equally accessible from Win98 and NT? If so, you'll need to divide the disk up into ten(!) 2GB partitions. That's no good. How about FAT32, it can handle big partitions. But then NT can't access FAT32 drives. Hmmm, maybe NTFS? Nope that's not accessible from DOS or Windows 98.
Then you remember: "Hey, the partition manager that comes with Red Hat Linux is much easier to use and would solve this problem easily." And this thought sticks in your mind like a bad pop song during your precious three day weekend while you try again and again to replace your aging dual-boot 2 Gig disk drive with a new 13 Gig one.
Now if you were a multi-billionaire, and your company had a monopolistic stranglehold on the computer industry, and you had 10 years of infinite resources to perfect your operating systems, don't you think you'd make sure that they could interoperate with one another's file systems? I mean how hard would it be to make NT read FAT32 drives? Sounds like a Service Pack no-brainer to me!
So why didn't Microsoft support FAT32 partitions in NT? Answer: they didn't have to.
They didn't want to support FAT32 so they didn't. There was no industry rival to eliminate in the file system area so it wasn't a priority. And since Microsoft controls the operating system, it made it nearly impossible for ISV's to make such support available.
Lack of FAT32 support in NT is really one of Microsoft's unforgivable sins and ranks highly among other sins such as Microsoft Bob and the Tandy MPC boondoggle. Proof that you don't have to be good if you've got a monopoly.
Our illustrious Web Master, and supreme online guru, Fredi, kindly mentioned in editing this column, "There is a least one third party software driver that allows you to access FAT32 drives under Windows NT 4.0 like you would, for example, NTFS partitions. You cannot boot from FAT32 partitions though, as the driver is loaded later." So, no smart flames from the cleverer ones among you out there. We are clued in, here at Tom's.
