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Date: Sat, 26 Apr 1997 20:00:42 -0500
To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, sysop@mixcom.com (Jeffrey J. Mountin)
From: Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com>
Subject: Re: VFAT 32 support in msdosfs
Cc: joa@kuebart.stuttgart.netsurf.de, hackers@freebsd.org
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At 12:46 PM 4/26/97 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
>MS will not supply NTFS with Windows 95 for two reasons: (1) it performs
>very poorly compared to VFAT; NT users who complain about performance
>are told by MS to go to VFAT instead, and (2) it is intentionally
>omitted because of MS's desire to get product distinction between
>Windows NT and Windows 95.  You should read between the lines of the
>introduction in the IFS95.DOC file that comes with the DDK.

When Windows 95 added FAT32 they created a significant hurdle for 
the Windows NT upgrade scenario.   To claim they did FAT32 to benefit 
Windows NT is hard to swallow.  If there's any truth to this, it was 
probably accidental.  I agree that NTFS would not perform very well 
in a 16-bit real-mode DOS environment, but that's not the reason either.

I think the main reason was the high development and testing effort 
required to support NTFS in the real-mode DOS portion of Windows 95.  
They would have to use very little memory, not require any additional 
files for booting, operate in the 16-bit real-mode segmented environment, 
and not require considerable boot-loader changes.  FAT32 is a simple and 
relatively easy extension to FAT16 that quickly got them past a 
significant problem with the growing number of disk drives greater 
than 2.1 GB, which are now already considered small.