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

Where have you gone, Peter Norton?

technologizer.com

127 pointstechnologizer60 comments

Peter 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

I remember exploring COMMAND.COM with DiskEdit. In going through the compiled code I realized that the common DOS commands, (DEL, COPY, etc.) basically had a 3 byte string after them in COMMAND.COM that would cause the program to jump to some subroutine that executed the actual operations underlying the command. If you, say, copied the jump code for DEL and pasted that where the REN(ame) command was, and then installed that new COMMAND.COM on the PC's in the schools lab, it caused some very frantic reactions ;)

I remember downloading an early Linux kernel image (0.9?) at a whopping 9600pbs and, this seriously predating installers, using DiskEdit to install it on a spare partition, booting and being somewhat underwhelmed by an install which wasn't more than /bin/sh.

I try to remember this any time I'm tempted to gripe about modern Linux installs.

I learned x86 via his books, quite good reading, specially how to write a DiskEdit clone.

Guys, 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

Interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

Hey! .... me too. I learnt a lot from his book -Inside the PC, which I think I bought by chance.

OT: I tried to get hold of a copy of Sidekick plus so I could play Vogon Poetry, but could not find this anywhere. So if anyone has a copy of Sidekick plus with Vogon Poetry....

and 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.

Which 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.

Tangentially related: Peter Norton didn't write Norton Commander. The original author was John Socha; the only thing NC has in common with Norton is the name and the Peter Norton Computing brand.

As to Midnight Commander: it works well enough for me. The lack of smoothness, such as function keys or ESC not working at all times, is mostly due to the quirks in Unix itself and is no fault of MC per se.

I still mourn the passing of Vern Buerg's LIST.COM (and Buerg (d. 2009) himself) though the enhanced v1.81 version is still available for download if you search for it, it is 16-bit only, and would anyhow be not much use to me since I migrated to Linux 18 or so years ago.

A 32bit/64bit replacement is being worked on with a beta available ( http://www.bizer.com/zblist/ ) but that seems to be windows only and closed.

The capabilities and performance of this tiny program were a source of wonder to me in my early dealings with the PC platform.

This was one of those brilliant little and elegant software designs that solved a particular problem perfectly, and really could not be improved in a major way. It had reached its design zenith.

I used it lots from the end of the 80s to the end of DOS in like 95-97.

Ahhhh, list.com! Used to use that all the time! When it became list.exe I thought "well there goes the neighborhood."

Same here, used list.com all the time back in the day.

I used NC but I stopped when I gave up DOS many years ago and I just never felt the need for it. Don't remember thinking "Wish I had NC here to do this...". Somehow current drag and drop file managers and command line options on Linux just do the trick.

Can go through a set of things you think NC is really great at that are just complicated with these other methods?

For Windows however there's an awesome and open source Far Manager - http://www.farmanager.com - but I guess if you know what NC was, then you already know about FM as well :)

For Windows, I used DISCo Commander for many years, then switched to Total Commander.

Dos 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.

Xtree Gold FTW :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree

There 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.

Can you maybe say what was so good about Norton Commander, so that those of us who didn't use it can find out a little more?

I will still mention mc because I think it is great. What does it miss? Your nc habits are applicable, it does it's job.

http://www.mucommander.com/

muCommander run ons OSX, Linux, BSD, Windows as it is a lightweight Java application.

especially nice on OSX as Finder comes nowhere close to its power features.

I don't have the experience with nc or mc to draw a complete comparison, but for visual / multipane file navigation within a shell, I've had good luck with ranger [1].

[1]: http://ranger.nongnu.org/

If there is no good replacement it is likely because it doesn't need to exist.

Shells are advanced enough now to be able to do everything you need in a more purposeful and extensible way.

It isn't exactly complex to write something like that these days.

You didn't use Norton Commander, did you?

No, shells are not the answer. Don't get me wrong: I love my tcsh and wouldn't give it up for the world. But certain tasks are so much better done in a commander-type tool.

And I disagree: it is quite complex to write something like that. It's easy to write a dual-pane file manager wannabe. It's very difficult to write a great tool that works fast and does exactly what is needed.

What can only be done with nc?

Also it isn't complex. If you have nc and you know specific things which make it better then implement something identical. It isn't magic.

I remembered using Norton Commander (albeit on DOS), but I can't seem to recall what the change to the numpad is, and how is it related with NC ??

Disassembling 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...

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.

Imgur link: http://i.imgur.com/P2q0nLH.jpg

The article seems to lament Peter's disappearance from the product boxes rather than real life.

Midnight Commander lives on :)

For those unfamiliar, it's a remake of the Norton Commander for Linux / Unix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander

Norton 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/.

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.

My 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/

Total Commander being that good, an open-source version of it was commissioned - Double Commander: http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net

It supports Total Commander's large pool of plug-ins, and is multi-platform.

And 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/

No! XTREE!

If you liked XTree, there's 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.

Or Lotus Magellan, next to which all other file managers pale in comparison

Also ytree: http://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html

It 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.

This article poses a question it never really answers to one's satisfaction

So, like life?

Peter 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.

I 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.

Too 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

Last 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/k...

In other words: Another great product down the drain. It's a real pity.

I 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.

Anyone remember the Norton Editor? One of the first commercial text editors. And actually decent for it's time.

Yes!! 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.

Norton Desktop, an EGA monitor, and Windows 3.11 had some early magic.

Norton ghost was quite awesome. It was the poor man's VM.

It'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.

I, uh, would disagree that McAfee has tried to fade in to obscurity. His recent media appearances have been quite interesting.

For those questioning why Peter Norton had his arms crossed, he was waiting for Windows to load.

Screw Peter Norton, I want to know what happened to Patrick Norton! :(

Surprised not to see the Norton Guides being mentioned yet :-)

But what about NORMAN Antivirus?

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