Norton Commander: the file manager that became DOS itself across the Soviet bloc
Development of Norton Commander
John Socha began writing what he called Visual DOS in 1984 while a Cornell graduate student, blending C and assembly when most programmers avoided C. Released as Norton Commander 1.0 in 1986, it grew into a cult hit, and in the USSR and Eastern Europe its blue screen became synonymous with DOS itself, even shaping IT hiring. The piece traces versions 1.0 through 5.5 and the people behind Peter Norton Computing.
I never finished writing the book because one small utility took on a life of its own.
- falsaberN1
I owe Norton a lot of joy for bringing orthodox file managers (the ones with two panes) and I can't live without them. They make file managing so comfortable compared to stuff like Windows Explorer or Nautilus (not saying they are bad though, I just prefer two panes).
Nowadays I mostly use clones like Midnight Commander, Krusader and Double Commander, and I used Worker (a clone of a clone, this time a clone of Directory Opus for the Amiga) for a long time before settling on Krusader as main one. The genealogy of these file managers is kind of fascinating.
Anyone else a fan?
- bananaflag
Growing up in the 90s, Norton Commander had this aura of mystery around it.
A lot of people I've met believed that it was a separate operating system. For example, I remember asking a friend "Did your computer had DOS in the beginning?" and he replied "Even worse, Norton."
My mom found me once aimlessly using my cousin's computer and she was shocked to discover I had opened Norton Commander (unintentionally of course) and told me "you know if you delete that, you'll delete all programs in the system" (passing over the absurdity of the claim itself, even then I didn't understand how opening it will make it more probable to delete it).
Not being Anglophone, even the name "Norton" sounded a bit dangerous, like something radioactive I guess.
Anyway afterwards when we got our own computer I pieced together what Norton actually was and the aura disappeared.
- hn_submit
I use one of its descendants, Total Commander, every day. It's one of the few applications I actually paid for, it's that critical for my daily computer usage.
What I love about it is that you get lifetime free updates.
I suspect that the author got setup for life selling it and instead of cashing out and selling it to some bigcorp (who undoubtedly would've changed the free update policy) he decided to keep the updates free forever.