Norton Commander

I'm still using Norton Commander version 1.00 (1986) in Windows 98SE, even in Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP. I prefer it's small size and fast, and I can write with it small batch programs. It was probably one of the most popular file manager of the DOS era, which along with Xtree remains one of the few programs which managed to transcend their DOS roots and Norton Commander descendants (OFM managers) now exist on all popular OSes. The first version of NC (1.0) was designed and written by John Socha in 1984-1989. We provide a short biographical notes about him later in this chapter . Starting from version 2 Norton Commander got a cult following, somewhat comparable with the success of 123, WordPerfect and MS Word, especially in former USSR and Eastern Europe, where blue screen of Norton Commander became the synonym of DOS. Many users from this region never suspected that this was not a native DOS interface. In Russian the words "Norton" and "Commander" became part of PC jargon and are widely used as synonyms for file manager. Please refer to Chapter 1 for more exploration of this phenomenon. Norton Commander was taught as a part of introductory computer classes in most of the former USSR region as well as Eastern European colleges and universities. That means that all graduates were more or less knowledgeable Norton Commander users and Norton Commander, in essence, served as standard interface for DOS. I would like to stress it again that many people from this region never suspected that this was not the part of DOS but an additional utility. In DOS days it even affected hiring process: the mastery of Norton Commander was irrevocably linked with mastery of DOS in minds of many Eastern European IT hiring managers. The initial version of Norton Commander was called VDOS (Visual DOS) and was written in a blend of C and assembler. As John Socha recollected the events (personal communication): At the time I called it Visual DOS, with the abbreviation of VDOS instead of the usual two-letter abbreviations used at the time. The program itself was inspired by several things coming together. I had a contract to write some books for Microsoft Press and actually spent some time in Bellevue, WA working on site. I'd take two months off from graduate school and write a book. At this time Peter Norton Computing was a one-man show. It was founded by Peter Norton who was one of the pioneer entrepreneurs in commercial PC software development. He formed his company in 1982 with $30,000 and an IBM computer (the company was sold for 70 million to Symantec in 1990; a nice return on investment). In 1992 Smart Computing paper Investigating The Lost Files Of Peter Norton, PC Pioneer Gillian Coolidge wrote: The story goes that Peter Norton worked in the aerospace industry back in the late 1970s, but he lost his job when Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed all made severe cutbacks. To pay the bills, Norton took contract computer programming jobs. One day, Norton accidentally deleted an important file, a common-enough error. Instead of re-entering all the information, however, he thought he'd write a computer program that would recover the lost data. (Some people are really motivated.) That program not only rescued the lost file, but its framework also eventually helped make Peter Norton very rich, and very famous. This was in 1982, and Norton marketed the program (primarily on foot) through the one-man software publishing company he formed, Peter Norton Computing Inc. (PNCI). The next year, PNCI released the second version of Norton Utilities, which was actually made up of several smaller programs that rescued lost'' files and disk contents. In 1984, PNCI reached $1 million in revenue, and version 3.0 of the Norton Utilities was released. At the time Peter Norton had three clerical people working for PNCI but he was doing all the software development plus book writing, manuals writing and running the business. It is important to