The History of Development of Norton Commander

Softpanorama May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-) Home Switchboard Unix Administration Red Hat TCP/IP Networks Neoliberalism Toxic Managers (slightly skeptical) Educational society promoting "Back to basics" movement against IT overcomplexity and bastardization of classic Unix Less is More: The Orthodox File Manager (OFM) Paradigm by Dr Nikolai Bezroukov Content : Foreword : Ch01 : Ch02 : Ch03 : Ch04 : Ch05 : Ch06 : Ch07 : OFM1999 : OFM2004 : OFM2012 2011: 25th Anniversary of Norton Commander 1.0 Release !!! (NC line of OFMs) Introduction The timeline The initial version of Norton Commander: NC 1.0 (1986) The first upgrade: NC 2.0 (1988) The most popular version of Norton Commander ever created: NC 3.0 (1989) The first flip-flop: NC 4.0 (1992) The last attempt to revive the brand: NC 5.0 (1993) The Last of Mohicans: Norton Commander 5.5 (1998) Norton Commander for OS/2 Notes about John Socha Webliography Introduction Study the past, if you would divine the future. -- Confucius Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time. -- Alvin Toffler Norton Commander for DOS is the original line of Orthodox file managers that exists in five major versions: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0. Only the last one has an additional sub-version (nc 5.5). All versions are still used (mostly by DOS enthusiasts) and are often posted on the abandonware sites. What is interesting, despite clear superiority of later versions, there are still users of version 1.0 of NC. For example, Symantec site contains an FAQ article: Is Norton Commander Version 1.0 or 2.0 Supported Under Windows NT 5 (Beta)?. Also in October of 2005 I received the following email addressed to me as an editor of the OFM page at the Softpanorama website ( Orthodox File Managers: Home of the OFM standards): Norton Commander 1.0 Hi, 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. Bye Alvaro Alonso From: Bogota, Colombia (South America) 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): I started work on what became known as the Norton Commander in the fall of 1984 while I was still a graduate student in Applied Physics at Cornell University. The first versions were entirely in assembly language, but that was too time-consuming, so I soon switched to a blend of C and assembly language at a time when most "real programmers" wouldn't touch C. 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. The second book was to be a book of small utility programs like I used to write for Softalk Magazine (such as whereis, scrnsave, etc.), but I never finished writing the book because one small utility took on a life of it's own. John Socha received both MS and PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University. After graduation from the university John became the first director of research and development for now defunct Peter Norton Computing. He was the second programmer in the company, hired shortly after Brad Kingsbury. 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. Norton called his program the Norton Utilities... 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 understand that th company actually was a one-man show with some supporting staff. So revenue that came with version 3.0 make it self-evident that the company needs to expand by hiring programmers. Brad Kingsbury, who was the author of NCD -- a utility that was later integrated into Norton Commander as "NCD mode" recollects those early days in the following way: I joined Peter Norton Computing in 1985, as the companys first programmer. My previous employer had just closed its doors, so I had sent my resume to a few companies in the area. Peter responded, flew me to Seattle where he was vacationing for the summer, and hired me on the spot. Because Peter was still on vacation, I worked out of a hotel in Seattle for my first two weeks on the job. After that, I spent another six months working from the Nortons kitchen table. When Eileen, Peters wife, started cooking dinner, I knew it was time to call it a day and head home. ... My job responsibility was to develop the software, and that's what I did. I just developed the programs, and that was pretty much the last day Peter programmed. The PNCI staff was up to five now. Peter did his writing, managing and marketing from the den of his home. The three clerical people worked upstairs... Peter Norton has always been a laid-back person. His whole philosophy, and I've heard him quote this many times, was, "We're going to do this business stuff while it's fun." So that was our primary focus that first it has to be fun, and second it has to make money. "I never knew what would happen if we didn't make any money and it was still fun. It probably wouldn't have been too fun at that point, especially for Peter,'' says Kingsbury. "But he wasn't out to create the next greatest generation of software, he wasn't out to make a whole lot of money. It was really to have fun and he enjoyed the flexibility of not having to work under someone else.'' PNCI reached $5 million in revenues in 1986. It published several other software packages but, according to Kingsbury, the Norton Utilities was still PNCI's cash cow. Utility software was gaining wider acceptance in the microcomputer industry as users realized the advantages of data recovery. Peter Norton essentially created a new class of software for PCs: "data recovery" software, the very profitable class of commercial software that soon will attract many competitors (with PC Tools as the most prominent). Quoting Peter Norton, "Why did The Norton Utilities become such popular software? Well, industry wisdom has it that software becomes standard either by providing superior capabilities or by solving problems that were previously unsolvable. In 1982, when I sat down at my PC to write Unerase, I was solving a common problem to which there was no readily available solution."[1] Peter Norton quickly realized that he tapped gold mine and he made a commitment to build the business. And that's one of the reasons why he hired Kingsbury and Socha. PNCI published several, more capable with each iteration versions of Norton Utilities for almost a decade of its existence.