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Norton Commander Windows 95 15: A History and Overview of the Legendary File Manager



The core of "Norton Utilities" was Peter Norton FAT file undelete utility. It allowed files to be restored if the clusters the file occupied before deletion were not yet overwritten. In FAT to restore the file it was enough to restore the first letter of the directory entry (a feature of theFAT file system used inMS-DOS, albeit one that was not originally documented). Following the initial release Peter Norton was made Utilities Editor ofPC Magazine.The package quickly grow and in the second version (version 4, 1986) contained approximately two dozens of utilities (Brad Kingsbury participated in writing of this version as he was hired in summer of 1985; he was a talented programmer and made several original contributions likendd). Linda Dudinyak was Software Architect at Peter Norton Computing from 1987 till 1990 and also made important contributions both to Norton commander and Norton Utilities.


Another interesting part of their software portfolio were famous Norton Guides, one of the first successful pre-HTML hypertext implementation for DOS. Later versions of Norton commander (starting from version 3.0 used this format for help). I think more then a dozen Norton Guides were produced and later guides in this format continued to appear despite the fact that the product was abandoned after acquisition of Norton Computing by Symantec: the format was reverse engineered and people just used it to produce their own guides. The total number of books that were converted to NG format is probably in hundreds. Among the original Norton Guides were:




Norton Commander Windows 95 15



The initial years of Norton commander development (1984-1988) were years of triumphant ascent of MS-DOS as the most widely used operating system on the planet, which rapidly replaced CP/M starting from late 1983. And rising tide lifts all boats: many programming products created for DOS became dominant in their class and even served as de-facto standards for porting to other OSes. And that was not limited to spreadsheets, word processors and computer games. Utilities were also a fast growing field. Crazy, high stress and high pressure atmosphere of the first commercial software start-ups is now semi-forgotten. But it was the first commercial software "gold rush" which later in a slightly different manner it was replayedduring dot-com bubble.


A built-in directory tree view was a very interesting and useful enhancement. It introduced the concept of NCD view and treeinfo.ncd disk directory structure caches. The concept was probably borrowed from the NCD.EXE (Norton Change Directory) which was one of best components of Norton Utilities suit of programs (along with famous file unerase utility). Norton Change Directory was designed and written by Brad Kingsbury. It permits quick and very convenient navigation on the directory tree by using pseudo-graphical representation of the tree similar to one used in windows File Explorer and introduced a quick search command on this representation when by typing the first letters of the directory you get to the first directory with this prefix; Ctrl-Enter gets you to the next. The results of NCD operation were stored in a separate file in the root directory of each drive (files treeinfo.ncd ) which saved time for rescanning. The files were kept in sync with the directory content if file operations were performed via Norton Commander so total rescans were needed rarely. This elegant solution used to work reasonably fast even on floppy drives.


I used it for creating the first issues of Softpanorama bulletin, one floppy electronic bulleting that I published from 1989 till 1996 (approximately the same time span as official versions of Norton Commanders ;-). Actually I switched to Norton Commander from Xtree, which I used for about a year. Old issues contain a lot of interesting historical information and some adds-on to Norton commander. They are available from this site for free download (texts are in Russian, but most programs use English).


Version 3.0 was a really impressive improvement over the version 2 and it extended the functionality of NC2 in many non-trivial ways. Due to the size of main module (ncmain.exe became 139K) swapping commander out of memory became standard mode of operation for users, instead of optional. Here is what we can learn from help about the team who created this amazing product:


At the top of each window is the paths of the two directories shown by the left and right windows. I call the horizontal marker the "bar." The bar marks a drive, a directory or a file. If the current directory is empty, the bar will be at the top of the screen.


You can select either by moving with the arrow keys and then pressingEnter or by typing the capitalized letter. Try selecting Brief; the window shows the current directory with files, though with names only. Do the same with the other window, by pressingTab, F9 and selecting Brief. If you press F9 and regret it, pressEsc. Move the bar up and down with the arrow keys. Notice that at the bottom of the small frame you get full information about the file or directory that the bar is resting upon.. Directories are written in capital letters and files are written with lowercase letters. Now selectFull for both windows (F9,Enter, Full,), which shows the files with name, size, date and time. This is my preference; you may have a different opinion.


My favourite was the Norton Commander, which I was using until the company gave it up when Windows 98 was dominating the consumer PC OS market. I am still using the follow-up software, nowadays known as Total Commander, mainly because of the two windows making it very simple to copy, move, look at and administer otherwise files as you like it. It is far more comfortable than the Windows Explorer, which has not really changed since it was launched.


I would like to stress it again that DOS NC4 failed to beat Volkov Commander in this new "orthodox file manager" development game. Volkov Commander was smaller, faster and, paradoxically, richer in features. It was written in assembler (actually it was a COM program). In the heavy-weight category NC 4.0 cannot compete with DN -- another very innovative and influential orthodox file manager. DN quickly found pretty wide user community in Eastern Europe. DN was larger then NC 4.0 and was written in a Turbo Vision which give it a rich Windows-style look and feel despite being a command line program: windows were very flexible and resizable in all dimensions. It also supported multiple panels. We will discuss both later in the book.


But at this time DOS was in severe decline and interest generated by new DOS programs started to fade. Windows 3.1 was the name of the game and understanding that the best DOS programs can benefit from conversion into 32-bit interface will come much later with Far and Total commander. There was no such understanding among Symantec brass and that probably was the root problem. But this "uncreative destruction" was typical for neoliberal companies, including most software startups.


Version 2 achieved some level of popularity reclaiming some market share for Symantec in the crowded space of Windows utilities. But probably revenue was not enough to continue the development and it was discontinued.The last Windows version of Norton Commander, 2.01, was released on February 1, 1999. I encountered uses of Norton Commander for Windows commander for Windows till late 2006 -- seven years after the last release. Now they almost all disappeared as NCW has problems with the version of NTFS used in Windows XP.


Later they understood the mistake they made and in 1997 there was a reincarnation attempt:probably due to pressure from users in Europe, a European-only Norton Commander for Windows was reintroduced in the Symantec product line (we will briefly discuss it in Chapter 5).NCW was released in early 1996 initially as Windows 95 version only.When I wanted to buy it I actually got a British version. It looks like the product did not sell well and Symantec was not flexible enough to scale down the development and wait for a Renaissance of command line just milking the franchise they acquired, the franchise that had a lot of devoted users. Actually I think they did not understand the importance of the unique method of integration with the Windows shell that Norton commander created (see for example NC for OS/2 which did not even continued command line functionality). And as a file manager it was difficult to compete with Windows Explorer which was free.


Abandonware sites contains good, almost complete collection of versions of Norton Commander. You can use Google search "Norton commander abandonware" to find them. It's not a legal way of obtaining them, though.


@rob.4Sorry, I don't know. I've not seen your Norton "pop-ups" nor know your machine.On my machine "Performance Alerting" is set to Log Only. -360/current/solutions/v36700888Maybe, your "Performance Alerting" is set to On. I don't know. On my machine. Norton "pop-ups" with Special Offer Notifications On were mostly adverts. I say mostly because on occasion I do see what I feel is a legit Norton "pop-up"....for example:I feel Important/Service Notifications are legit/reminders. Just me.I know users do not like Important/Service Notifications. Please review: How do I get rid of Norton Popups -do-i-get-rid-norton-popupsCaveat: I see fewer Norton marketing/advert "pop-ups" with Special Offer Notifications Off. I know how to quiet Norton, if needed. Just me.


Please feel free to contact us once more by chat in order to talk with a Norton agent. We would like to inform you that filling in the contact form is not equivalent with contacting Norton product support. Once you complete the form with the information requested click the Save button and you will be invited to start chatting with a Norton representative.Our chat contact details and hours of operation are as follows:Chat: http: //www. norton. com/chatHours: 24x7 chat supportWe offer the best support when you are at your device with a Norton Product installed, when you contact us.Our Support Portal http: //www. norton. com/support/also offers a lot of information that can help you resolve any issues.Thank you for your patience.Best Regards,Norton Support 2ff7e9595c


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