Where have you gone, Peter Norton? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Where have you gone, Peter Norton? (2014)

technologizer.com

115 pointspjerem66 comments

A few past threads:

Where Have You Gone, Peter Norton? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21706429 - Dec 2019 (69 comments)

Where Have You Gone, Peter Norton? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11211682 - March 2016 (21 comments)

Where have you gone, Peter Norton? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7856339 - June 2014 (60 comments)

Norton's Guide to the IBM PC was my intro to O/S internals and the magic incantations that gave them life. PCs seemed more fun to use back then, perhaps because, like the text-only Infocom games, they could be a ship of discovery sailing into worlds unknown, rather than what they've become today, a window to the humdrum desktop of a business.

I leafed through that and many other books at the library when I was getting into computing as a teen. I remember the Norton books were as thick as phone books and had just about everything you wanted to know about PCs.

I think the PC* environment roughly went through three phases.

1st phase: You must do everything by yourself.

2nd phase: You can do everything by yourself.

3rd phase: You must do everything through the OS.

The third phase is much more safe and more convenient, but also much less exciting.

* in the wider meaning, not necessarily only IBM clone

On the other hand, I'm much more effective at the things I actually wanted to do with the computer in phase 3. I think there's roughly two tracks for people who got into computers early: people who enjoyed fiddling with computers and people who fiddled with computers to get to what they wanted.

I just wanted to play Wing Commander. The range of things I want to do has expanded, but none of them involve working under the hood (software or hardware).

> I'm much more effective at the things I actually wanted to do with the computer in phase 3

I agree, that's what I meant with "more convenient".

p.s. Also, yeah, I guess I mostly just enjoyed the fiddling to get the damn machine to do crazy things at my bidding just because I found the right incantations to make it so.

Norton Editor was my favorite editor. I carried it around on a 3 1/2" diskette (with other essential utilities), for years.

It had a unique feature in its copy-paste. If you marked a region and then moved 1 character into the region and pasted it, the editor expanded the marked region to include the copied text. You could repeat that and grow a paste buffer exponentially. I used to have fun using that to create huge files with funny (to a teenager) quotes quickly on diskettes that my friends had laying around and then hiding the file.

More info here:

https://winworldpc.com/product/norton-editor/20

One of my very first jobs let me buy Norton Utilities, which had "Norton CD" (ncd, I think) that was a smarter version of the cd command. When I left that company I was so addicted to ncd that I wrote my own. I have long left Windows behind for Linux but I still have my own version of ncd that I have ported to BASH and use about every 10 minutes. Norton's legacy lives on 25+ years later in my habits.

> Norton CD

Out of curiosity, I started googling, and this seems like a good place to read about ncd and more: http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/norton_change_directory_clon....

How have you ported ncd to Linux? The cd command only works as a shell built in, otherwise it can’t change the shells current directory.

The obvious way would be to either implement it as a shell function or to use a small wrapper function that calls out to script which returns the new desired directory and then cd's to that.

I've set up an alias to source my script (xd.sh) like:

alias xd=. xd.sh

Sourcing the script allows it to change the current directory.

Have you open sourced this anywhere? Sounds extremely useful!

Ok, I read parts of his books back in the days and this jogged those memories ... including pinging friends who used those books more than me.

Was curious what his net worth was ... and found answers in single digit millions, except one article that said 175M but that was a 20 year old article. (I think given the flavor of the week, I can safely blame google for not finding the right links :)). I did read the wikipedia entry about him but still wonder about the ups and downs of his life and how he is doing nowadays at 78. If someone has a more recent profile, even a hagiography, please do share a link.

> Why did Norton products no longer carry pictures of their founder? I don’t know. Maybe Symantec did extensive market testing before it made the move; maybe not.

The date of 2001 may be a hint. Maybe Peter Norton was contractually obliged to let himself be printed on the Symantec boxes for 10 years after selling the company, and after that he couldn't be bothered to do it anymore?

Symantec was obligated to pay him a royalty on every box with his picture on it. When I joined Symantec in 1995 they were cursing this royalty and trying to eliminate his picture. Products did not sell as well without it so they kept it until they found it was no longer needed to sell their stuff

My first introduction to troubleshooting computers was with the Norton Utilities.

I held onto the manual well into the late 2000's. I remember seeing the last few pages of the book where everyone who worked on the product had their signatures on it, and kind of hoping that my signature would be in a book like that one of these days.

I’m wondering :-) FYI, I can’t scroll on mobile on this website. I’m on an iphone.

Looking forward to checking it out if you get scroll fixed!

You can use the reader mode to get over the website shenanigans.

I had the same issue. They’re probably attempting some stupid smooth-scroll effect. Reader mode will fix it.

(This is why, as a web dev, I never tamper with scrolling. It’s too crucial an interaction to have something go wrong.)

You can manage to defeat the website’s scrolling prevention by starting to move your finger sideways and then curving towards the vertical (in a quarter-circle sort of motion).

How did you find out?!

I just sort of played around with combinations of moving one or two fingers in different directions until I found one that let me scroll, it took around 20 or 30 seconds.

iOS scrolling is very nuanced, so whenever a website tries to mess with it you can always find some kind of edge case that breaks the site.

"Pink Shirt Book. Guide to IBM PCs. So called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy wears on the cover." --Crash Override, Hackers

First thought in my head.

Norton purchased J.D. Salinger's letters to Joyce Maynard and returned them to him (Salinger by law retained the copyright to the letters, but the recipient retains ownership of the physical letters).

The article mentions Xtree which does live on today in Linuxland as ytree.

Clearly not the same place McAfee went, that's for sure.

The late 80's early 90's had some strange Tier-2 computer celebs (Tier 1 being Jobs, Grove, Ellison, and Gates).

There aren't enough bath salts in the world for the second McAfee.

Probably enough bath salts, but maybe not enough whales.

You just explained Elon Musk

God, is he gonna end up an even bigger weirdo when he retires and doesn't have any work to do?

At least he won’t be an issue for people still living on Earth.

He's going to keep poking the bear until the bear is alien life that decides humanity is too great a risk to the cosmic community.

Peter Norton would never murder someone in Belize. Just saying...

There are many tier 2 or 3 celebs today. Weirdos running big porn or gambling sites. I know guys making 10s of millions per year by having huge collections of ad invested websites. Many of them have super yachts in Monaco.

Not quite today, but Kim Dotcom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi

These types of guys are the new old money people of silicon valley.

Edit: I think there are at least several multi-millionaire and billionaires from MS Office space. Joel Spolsky used to be a program manager of MS Excel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky

I use Midnight Commander (inspired by Norton Commander) all the time.

Same here! On Windows, I used to make heavy use of FarManager, which is also inspired by Norton Commander and looks and feels about the same.

I can relate so much to this. In my early years my favorite program for PC, besides, Flight Sim 4 (to date this properly) was Norton Utilities.

tl;dr: He does some philanthropy and collects art, but the article doesn't say anything more about that.

----

Also

> Norton AntiVirus, which eventually became the best-known Norton-branded product

If you ask me, this was, and always will be, Norton Commander. Anti-viruses are a dime a dozen, and Norton's didn't outshine others. But the two-column sub-columnized folder display - which NC either invented or perfected - was a UI design gem.

> If you ask me, this was, and always will be, Norton Commander. Anti-viruses are a dime a dozen, and Norton's didn't outshine others.

Norton AntiVirus was the one I remember seeing prominently displayed at CompUSA or Circuit City back when you bought software as book-sized boxes containing disk(ette)?s in the 90s. You could find Norton Utilities, but when PCs became big with the general public around the early to mid 90s, Norton AntiVirus was clearly a moneymaker.

ndos was a pretty nice dos alternative too, though I eventually settled on drdos

Ndos was a command.com alternative, not a DOS replacement like DRDos. It was based on 4DOS, and yes, it was a giant leap upwards, not unlike the experience that the Fish shell provides today.

oh, right you are! it's been a while :)

Midnight Commander and FAR Manager are two apps that at least some years ago were continuing that concept.

Midnight Commander (mc) is still going strong. I use it every day and it's in most distros.

I use Midnight commander every day on Linux in text mode. On Windows and Linux desktop I use Total Commander and Double Commander respectively.

FAR is still alive and well - more faithful to Norton Commander than Midnight commander. Very popular in Russia, for obvious reasons. I worked with some Russian colleagues (in the US). Every one of them used FAR.

Those are just clones of the exact same app. If you look at graphical FTP and SFTP clients - many of them use this basic layout.

Also, one could also mention "Windows Commander" which is a non-FOSS NC-like program (for Windows).

I know somebody who worked in the arts in NYC a while back and went to a party hosted at Peter's place. Apparently he has a wild art collection.

My name is also Peter Norton and so in the 90s I was introduced to this Peter F. Norton because he had bought the art of, and stayed in touch with one of the cofounders of the internet 1.0 company where I worked (whose name was also Peter).

He said that he was happy because he had always had art in his life, so when he sold his company and embarked on a life as an art collector (he was the premier collector of southern California art for a while iirc) he was very happy with his life.

One time in Georgetown Seattle, the guy who ran the fantagtaphics store recognized my name. For a while the other Peter F Norton was talking with MS (remember when they stole the disk defragmenter and didn't pay for it?), and this guy, he ran an art gallery near what is now the art museum, and Peter would apparently budget to just buy a bunch of art from his gallery each visit. So his art collection was always a passion and always a part of him.

Pathminder appears to have predated Norton Commander by a couple of years, tough I've never used it.

As a former Amiga user I'm compelled to argue the ones who perfected this was Disk Master and Directory Opus ;) Directory Opus is still available, now for Windows, but looks nothing like the early versions and frankly I don't like the modern versions.

Personally I preferred Disk Master II [1], which by default kept the two directory listings and a command palette, but instead of making them fixed like most file managers of the era (including the previous version of Disk Master [2]), the directory listings and the command palette were all windows, and you could configure the layout and which commands were included so you could e.g. have it execute your own scripts and the like (I'm sure most gui file managers have that today - at the time it wasn't at all ubiquitous).

EDIT: AmigaOS also had CLImate which used a similar two-pane system, and which came out about the same time as Norton, but CLImate was very primitive and marred by the developers seemingly wanting to make full use of the available fonts provided with AmigaOS - note the at least three different fonts on the buttons [3] - and way too much padding taking space from the directory listings.

[1] http://myplace.frontier.com/~jodytierney/dm2.html (click on the image for a bigger version) shows a customised DM II setup.

[2] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/411586853453284894/

[3] http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?s=2b3fea62abf55fc52bffc7...

It was good, but by the time NC was around I was already using a shareware tool called Stereo Shell that I liked better.

There's some screenshots here:

https://www.danielsays.com/ssg-dossw-ss410.html

I think about Stereo Shell every time I use Pathfinder on my Mac.

Norton Commander sure left a legacy that remains alive to this day.

I never used the original myself, but I've used (and continue to use) a number of file managers that copied it, both terminal and GUI versions.

Norton Ghost in 2002 was the last time I remember using on of the companies products.

It was fantastic for mass imaging rooms at my school.

Oh where does the time go :-)

Back around 2003, I couldn't convince those that counted to spring the petty cash for Ghost; ended up building a custom Morphix[0] CD - well two actually. On boot up, one image would "dd | ftp <local ftp server>" to create an image to be used by the second which . . . splat the ftp disk image onto as many machines as there were copies of that cd. Improved the life of our PC techs measurably. If the techs needed to build more desktops they just burnt another cd. Was an all MS shop, but for this, I was granted an indulgence.

[0] https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=morphix

Heh, I remember one time our teacher was running late in trade school. When he finally arrived, he explained that on top of his teaching duties, he was also kind of the network admin, and had been chasing a network ... disturbance that turned out to be someone running Norton Ghost to clone a drive to a network adress... and then sent it the UDP broadcast adress, thus swamping the network.

It's not the tool's fault, of course, but it made me giggle a bit back then. I never found out, though, if the culprit was acting maliciously or stupidly.

Norton was a legendary figure to me. When I was starting my University studies some of my friends would say things like "Peter Norton is the best programmer in the world, and he codes in C". I had seen Norton Disk Doctor magically repair a defective floppy disk, so I had to learn C to be a alpha developer!

Then I read his 8086 Assembler book, probably written by the awesome John Socha, and it was a very well written book. Norton Commander (also by Socha) became my de-factor DOS shell. Norton Guides were handy to have while developing TSR programs.

And that's about it. I have fond memories of Norton, but I think his trajectory after developer stardom is still somewhat a mistery.

I heard he teamed up with Edgar the virus hunter.

Drop a train on em, Edgar

As kids we shared disks with games in school at a time when games began to need 10+ 3.5" disks. To save disks we zipped them with RAR and splitted the archive. Often one disk (usually the last one) was defect. What to do? Waiting till Monday? No, Norton Disk Utils to the rescue! Thanks, Peter, for many saved weekends.

It didn't work that way on hard drives, usually Spinrite worked better than Norton Diskdoctor.

But in the floppy days it was a life saver.

The images in this post gave me heady flashbacks of my after-school job at CompUSA at 16 stocking shelves and helping soccer moms. I wasn't even technically allowed to work there. Corporate set minimum age was 18 so I wasn't allowed to cash in on any of the commissions on printer warranties I sold.

> And here, in an image which I find vaguely unsettling, is a folded-arm, pink-shirt Norton in a very early (1991) ad for Norton AntiVirus, which eventually became the best-known Norton-branded product …

Published in 1991 - mildly unsettling in 2014 - commonplace in 202x

He ran out of ideas and was frozen in time like Walt Disney until the future had better opportunities.

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