 Does anyone here remember Norton Utilities? I realized recently how much of an influence those had on me back in the day. This suite of little useful nerdy DOS tools that eventually got packaged together and had their own little shared UI universe… In hindsight, together with Norton Commander, this was the first GUI I used in my life! But also there was something amazing about having this kind of a Swiss Army knife. A little toolbox of getting under the hood of your computer.    26 comments
@vlothonian mc seems heavily inspired by nc. Try hitting CTRL-PgUp in any directory (I didn’t find any mention of that key combo in the nc help anywhere) @schmudde I developed a certain later affection for Xtree, but haven’t really gotten into PC Tools! Would be fun to compare now.  @mwichary Defraggers were a huge deal in those days. I think that aside from video games, the first thing I ever used that you could really call a GUI was probably a paint program--either KoalaPainter on a friend's computer, or the one that came with the Atari Touch Tablet. It was a revelation.  @mwichary Yup, pretty much lived in NC in my 386 and 486 days. Still have it on both machines. I have a small collection of three of four of the NU versions in my closet. @mwichary Costco used to sell them at a pretty decent price. Looks like I've got version 5.5 on my Zeos 386. I think 8 was the last pure dos version. @mwichary I used Norton Commander back in the day. After transitioning to Linux (SuSE Linux 6.0) in the late '90s, I've used the FOSS version called Midnight Commander, and I use MC to this day. It's the only way to quickly move or edit files on the command line. @elaterite I had so much NC in my motor memory… it might still be there somewhere. F3 view F4 edit F5 copy F6 move F7 mkdir F8 delete F10 quit   @mwichary Wow. What a flashback! ☺️ @mwichary I'd argue the NC file explore was superior to Window 2.0 in its entirety, but that's just me.  @mwichary "own little shared UI universe" surprises me. I am not a DOS guy, but I always assumed Norton Utilities adhered to IBM's CUA. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access) Is it very different from CUA or are the differences minor?  @mwichary 🖐️ Yo, I do. Seeing the pics made an immediate refresher to my memory of fixing some fiddly stuff on my first PC.  @mwichary We wrote almost all assembler code for our demos (1992-1996) in Norton Commander. As long as you didn’t write code that crashed your machine (which admittedly happened all the time) it was the closest we had to an IDE. |
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Looks like the midnight commander, a common Linux Tool.