The history of Norton Commander (and other early MS-DOS utilities)

As a fan of midnightcommander on linux, I did some research attempting to confirm that it was a clone or copy of Norton Commander. I found on some old forgotten ftp sites of DOS stuff a similar program called "dc", presumably for "disk commander", that was a very trimmed down and fast version of the same concept. I think dc looked more like mc in some of it's keystroke mappings. I have no idea if dc copied mc or vice versa, however.

I believe dc was given away in a floppy disk inserted in a computer shopper magazine sometime in the early 90s.

I built a floppy based linux to emulate the use of a parallel port "laplink" to shift files -- you stick the disk in each computer, and mc pops up with the files on the remote computer on the left and the local files on the right, and you can copy them back and forth.

I would not might having mc on my android phone. Maybe I will try to port it.

Coincidentally, I used the phrase, "since these were the days of DOS and Norton Commander, QBasic was to be my playground," on a goal statement for a PH.D. program earlier today.

HN to the rescue again confirming the chronology for me, without the need for me to ask.

This prompted me to see if there was a decent clone of NC for Unix, and it looks like Midnight Commander is well-reviewed and open-source:

http://www.midnight-commander.org/

I never did get to grips with the likes of NC or XTG. They always seemed to slow me down, kind of like they were designed for dummies. If I wanted to do some serious shifting of files, I was happy with DOS, if I wanted something visual, then Gem was there... Maybe I just started too late with PCs.

I remember always using a cleverly named utility called "list" instead of NC. It was faster and lighter weight. I had it renamed to "l" and stuck in my path somewhere on all of my machines so I could pull it up in 2 keystrokes.

Finally had to get rid of it somewhere around Windows 98

I use mc on osx/linux, and far on Windows. Great products!

That takes me back, I used to use NC on my 486 at university, great app in its day.