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Where have you gone, Peter Norton?
- shmerl 12y agoMidnight Commander lives on :) For those unfamiliar, it's a remake of the Norton Commander for Linux / Unix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
- herokusaki 12y agoAnd for Windows there is Far Manager, which since 2007 has been open source as well (BSD license) and has plugin support. http://www.farmanager.com/ http://www.farmanager.com/
- rmason 12y agoMy German programmer friends all rave about Total Commander for Windows which was built to take the place of Norton Commander for the power user. Always been meaning to try it. http://www.ghisler.com/ http://www.ghisler.com/
- restalis 12y agoTotal Commander being that good, an open-source version of it was commissioned - Double Commander: http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net It supports Total Commander's large pool of plug-ins, and is multi-platform.
- fit2rule 12y agoNo! XTREE!
- chuckup 12y agoIf you liked XTree, there's http://www.ztree.com http://www.ztree.com It's been in active development for... as long as I can remember. Think XTree on steroids. Norton Commander was neat, but XTree blew it away.
- loevborg 12y agoOr Lotus Magellan, next to which all other file managers pale in comparison
- olgeni 12y agoAlso ytree: http://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html http://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html
- certainly_not 12y agoNorton Commander was a great concept, but what really perfected that concept was Dos Navigator... It had so many useful features... If you didn't use it in the 90's, you missed out on a legend! It was open-sourced after DOS became history: http://www.dnosp.com/ http://www.dnosp.com/. And there was also Volkov Commander, which was about feature-equal with NC, but was written by hand in assembly. Tiny resource usage and lightning speed.
- kschua 12y agoPeter Norton was my hero way back in the late 80's to early 90's. I remember the first time I used Unerase to recover a deleted file and was fascinated by it. Then I discovered DiskEdit and began poking around in the FAT system and found out more about how DOS actually deletes a file. It actually marks the first character with a ?. Thus started my hacking days. Then I used DiskEdit to bypass copy protection hacking the byte codes. DiskEdit rescued me again when I switch to DR-DOS, set passwords on my files and forgot the passwords (fwiw, it was just setting the next dozen or so bytes after the file name in the FAT to zero) Such memomories, DiskEdit and SideKick were my two must have utilities in the days of DOS
- arjn 12y agoHey! .... me too. I learnt a lot from his book -Inside the PC, which I think I bought by chance.
- pjmlp 12y agoI learned x86 via his books, quite good reading, specially how to write a DiskEdit clone.
- zura 12y agoGuys, I hate to crash your heroes but it is John Socha [0] who you should really admire :) He wrote Norton Commander and that Assembly book which was published under Norton's name. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Socha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Socha
- pjmlp 12y agoInteresting. Thanks for pointing it out.
- Shivetya 12y agoand here I almost feel guilty for using DiskEdit to hack my game save files. Though I could sit and watch my disk defrag and would run maps just to see where everything was.
- jacquesm 12y agoDisassembling the Norton Utilities and annotating them was an excellent way to learn how to program X86, I'm not sure if by then Peter was still writing himself or too busy managing his growing empire but that was some pretty tight code. Think 'gnu base utils' but instead of in C a good chunk of it (if not all) was in assembler. It's a pity the article does not really answer the question in the title, Peter is simply getting older (he's probably in his 70's now). Here he is at some function a few years ago, looking happy and well: http://i558.photobucket.com/albums/ss23/Image-Gallery/norton.jpg http://i558.photobucket.com/albums/ss23/Image-Gallery/norton... I wish him a very long life and much joy, he's done a ton of good for the PC industry and his books on low level PC stuff were quite useful.
- jamespo 12y agoThe article seems to lament Peter's disappearance from the product boxes rather than real life.
- owenversteeg 12y agoImgur link: http://i.imgur.com/P2q0nLH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/P2q0nLH.jpg
- easytiger 12y agoThis article poses a question it never really answers to one's satisfaction
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- coldtea 12y agoSo, like life?
- jwr 12y agoWhich reminds me that to this day there is no good replacement for Norton Commander (for UNIX systems, of course). Please, don't even start mentioning Midnight Commander. It is nowhere near as good. Oh, sure, it has a bazillion fancy features, but it just doesn't work that well, isn't as smooth as the original was. Remember, kids, not every file manager that has two panes can be called a "Norton Commander replacement"! Those of us who grew up using Norton Commander still look at the redesigned ("improved") numpads on modern keyboards and shake their head in horror and disbelief, remapping those keys to what they Should Be.
- ajuc 12y agoDos navigator was better than nc. Also midnight commander has much better editor than both norton commander and dos navigator. I use mcedit instead of vi or nano and it works great.
- nathell 12y agoThere also was Volkov Commander and DOS Controller. The latter is notable for managing to pack all the essential functionality of NC into a self-contained single .COM executable weighing in at less than 50KB.
- Intermernet 12y agoXtree Gold FTW :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree
- huhtenberg 12y agoFor Windows however there's an awesome and open source Far Manager - http://www.farmanager.com http://www.farmanager.com - but I guess if you know what NC was, then you already know about FM as well :)
- zura 12y agoFor Windows, I used DISCo Commander for many years, then switched to Total Commander.
- kayoone 12y agoIt was a different time obviously but still goes to show you can still achieve great things even if you are not the typical 20-something hacker anymore ;) Peter Norton was around 40 years old when he first released Norton Utilities and started that remarkable part of his career. Given the time, he probably didn't even start programming until he was 30.
- SeanDav 12y agoPeter Norton's books, or at least the ones he wrote himself initially, were wonderfully clear and well written, even though they absolutely got down to the bare metal. I kept my copies for many years because I could not bring myself to get rid of them.
- ternaryoperator 12y agoAnyone remember the Norton Editor? One of the first commercial text editors. And actually decent for it's time.
- bobochan 12y agoYes!! Turbo Pascal had an okay editor, but I remember always firing up ne.com when I needed to edit a lot of code. There was a menu when you pressed F4 for "block" commands, like copying and pasting. One of my to-do's is to write an emacs mode would emulate the Norton Editor, and then my geek life would be considered complete.
- mixmastamyk 12y agoI worked at symc for a while and the conventional wisdom was that taking Norton off the boxes was a way to reduce the royalties that needed to be paid to him. There is also a line of enterprise products dubbed "Symantec Antivirus" that reduces royalties even further.
- general_failure 12y agoNorton ghost was quite awesome. It was the poor man's VM.
- throwwit 12y agoNorton Desktop, an EGA monitor, and Windows 3.11 had some early magic.
- sequencepoint 12y agoSurprised not to see the Norton Guides being mentioned yet :-)
- sdegutis 12y agoIt's kind of interesting how both Norton and McAfee faded into obscurity (or tried to) after publishing and eventually detaching from security software -- and probably not coincidental.
- cr3ative 12y agoI, uh, would disagree that McAfee has tried to fade in to obscurity. His recent media appearances have been quite interesting.
- mschuster91 12y agoToo bad that these days Symantec/Norton AV is more known for 1) being installed on millions of PCs by the manufacturer, including on the recovery CDs and 2) being a performance sucker. Norton/Symantec AV is best called crapware these days. First thing I do on every client's computer is remove Norton/Symantec, solves about 50% of the "why is my PC slow" questions
- gus_massa 12y agoLast week I lost a few hours removing the 30-days trial Norton sofware from my aunt-in-law new notebook. I felt very sad remembering the old good days of the Norton suit :(. Link to complete uninstaller: https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/kb20080710133834EN_EndUserProfile_en_us https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/k...
- mschuster91 12y agoIn other words: Another great product down the drain. It's a real pity.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rhuppert 12y agoFor those questioning why Peter Norton had his arms crossed, he was waiting for Windows to load.
- darksim905 12y agoScrew Peter Norton, I want to know what happened to Patrick Norton! :(
- feld 12y agoBut what about NORMAN Antivirus?
- fasteo 12y agoI will always remember the nights I spent reading Norton books to write my first (and only) TSR (Terminate and State Resident) program: Upon detecting a floppy disk inserted in A: or B: it would ask for a password before granting access. Ahh, I am getting old.