Lessons of a FAT God: A retrospective on the FAT file system

It’s almost been 24 years since the shift of exFAT to NTFS on Windows XP, the last bastion of native FAT-family support on any Windows systems. While exFAT still persists in USB flash drives, boot partitions and some legacy partitions, FAT is mostly gone in the Windows space, being surpassed by NTFS and reFS yet it survives in many parts of computing systems to this day.