exFat was introduced on Windows Vista with the release of
Windows Vista's (Sp1) (January 30, 2007) and then a bit later on it was releasd also for XP(sp2,sp3) via an update. Windows XP requires
update KB955704 (Jan 2009) to be installed to support exFAT. the original download page can be viewed at this link which says that its intended for use with XP service pack 2, or XP sp3..
(not sure if it will work with vanilla XP... anyone know? please post) http://web.archive.org/web/20090201042823/http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1cbe3906-ddd1-4ca2-b727-c2dff5e30f61&displaylang=enhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFATexFAT was introduced in
late 2006 as part of Windows CE 6.0 (Nov 2006), an embedded Windows operating system. Most of the vendors signing on for licenses are manufacturers of embedded systems or device manufacturers that produce media formatted with exFAT. The entire File Allocation Table (FAT) family, exFAT included, is used for embedded systems because
it is lightweight and is better suited for solutions that have low memory and low power requirements, and can be easily implemented in firmware.
also of course, exFAT has both Mac + PC support, and support for files larger than 4GB
Unlike the NTFS file system which is read-only on Mac (NTFS for Mac can help with that), macOS fully supports reading and writing exFAT external drives starting from Mac OS X10.6.5 in 2009. (Snow Leopard and up)