
Where have you gone, Peter Norton? - technologizer
http://www.technologizer.com/2014/06/05/where-have-you-gone-peter-norton/
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kschua
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

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

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zura
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Socha)

~~~
pjmlp
Interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.

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jwr
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.

~~~
ttctciyf
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/](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.

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

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

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jacquesm
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...](http://i558.photobucket.com/albums/ss23/Image-
Gallery/norton.jpg)

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.

~~~
owenversteeg
Imgur link: [http://i.imgur.com/P2q0nLH.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/P2q0nLH.jpg)

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shmerl
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander)

~~~
fit2rule
No! XTREE!

~~~
chuckup
If you liked XTree, there's [http://www.ztree.com](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.

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kayoone
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.

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

~~~
coldtea
So, like life?

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SeanDav
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.

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mixmastamyk
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.

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mschuster91
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

~~~
gus_massa
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...](https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/kb20080710133834EN_EndUserProfile_en_us)

~~~
mschuster91
In other words: Another great product down the drain. It's a real pity.

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

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bobochan
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.

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

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fasteo
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.

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

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sdegutis
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.

~~~
cr3ative
I, uh, would disagree that McAfee has tried to fade in to obscurity. His
recent media appearances have been quite interesting.

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

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darksim905
Screw Peter Norton, I want to know what happened to Patrick Norton! :(

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

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feld
But what about _NORMAN_ Antivirus?

