History of the creation of Norton Commander. Part 1: introduction
Translated three days with varying success, the text remains twice as large =) Enjoy the success story that few people know, but everyone knows the product itself.
Drunk programmer is sitting open with Norton Commander on the screen. The C drive is open on both panels. “Well, why do I need two C disks with the same files?” He thought and erased all its contents by pressing F8 and Enter.
- an anecdote of the late 80s ( and I slammed a couple of folders when I was small - approx. Transl. )
Norton (Norton Commander) for DOS is a file manager for DOS, which existed in 5 major versions - 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and only the latest version has version 5.5. Many versions are still used by various enthusiasts and are on various sites on the Internet.
For example, the Symantec site contains the following FAQ section: “Does Norton Commander 1.0 / 2.0 support MS Windows NT 5 (Beta) operation?”
It was probably one of the most popular file managers in the era of the DOS operating system, which, along with XTree, broke with its roots DOS and in the form of other programs that inherit its functionality that exist on other operating systems.
The first version of NC 1.0 was developed by John Soch (Jonh Socha) in 1984-1989.
')
Starting with version 2, Norton Commander was a success comparable to 123, WordPerfect and MS Word, especially in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, where the blue screen of Norton Commander became synonymous with DOS. Many users have never even suspected that this is not the native interface of DOS, and in Russian the words “Norton” and “Commander” became part of the jargon of IT staff, and became, in fact, synonymous with the file manager.
Norton Commander was taught in classes in schools and institutes in most countries of the region of the former USSR, as well as European colleges and universities in eastern countries. This means that all graduates were more or less experienced users of Norton, which was the standard interface for DOS. And I would like to emphasize once again that many people did not even suspect that it was not part of DOS, but simply an additional utility. And the era of DOS has even affected the hiring process: the skill of using Norton Commander has become associated with using the DOS system in the minds of many hiring managers of IT specialists.
The very first version of the DOS shell was named VDOS (Visual DOS) and was written in a mixture of C and Assembler. As John Socha said, recalling past events:
John Socha received both MS and PhD in the direction of Applied Physics at Cornell University. After graduating from university, John became the first director of the research and development department of the now defunct Peter Norton Computing. He was the second programmer at the company and soon hired Brad Kingsberry.
At this time, Peter Norton Computing was a one-man show. It was founded by one of the pioneers of entrepreneurs in the development of commercial software. He created his first company in 1982 with $ 30,000 and an IBM computer (the company was sold to Symantec for 70 million in 1990). In 1992, the Smart Computing newspaper in the article “Investigating The Lost Files Of Peter Norton, PC Pioneer” Jillian Coolidge wrote:
In 1984, PNCI received $ 1M dollars, and also released Norton Utilities version 3. At that time, three people worked for the company. However, he himself was engaged in all the development and writing of books, manuals and business. It is important to understand that in fact the company was a one-man show with some support staff. Because the income that was received from version 3.0 made it obvious: the company needs to be expanded. A programmer is required. Brad Kingsberry, who authored the NCD utility (which was later integrated into Norton Commander as NCD mode), recalls those days:
Peter Norton, in fact, created a new class of software for personal computers: data recovery software. And, since this area was a profitable sector, it became clear that this would begin to attract competitors (PC Tools was the most outstanding). Quoting Peter Norton:
Peter Norton quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a gold mine and started doing business. This was one of the reasons he hired Kingsberry and Soch.
PNCI published several versions, each of which was more and more capable for almost a decade of its existence. Peter Norton was also a gifted writer, which was an important part of PR. He also wrote several books. His most influential book was co-authored with John Socha and was the best book to study Intel's Assembler for more than a decade. By the way, his famous quote: “Assembly language is an extravagant result of the work of human talent and you should avoid it wherever possible,” - from the 1986 edition.
The core of the Norton Utilities was the FAT Undelete utility, which allowed you to recover files if their clusters were not rewritten when creating new files. In the FAT system, in order to restore the file, it was enough to restore the first letter of the file name in the directory entry (this feature of the FAT file system was used by the DOS system, but was not documented). After the first release, Peter Norton made the Utilities Editor for PC Magazine. The package grew rapidly and the second version (ver. 4, 1986) contained more than 20 utilities (Brad Kingsberry took part in the development, since he was hired in the summer of 1985. He was a talented programmer and made many contributions to the development of utilities. An example would be ndd)
Later, other successful programs were added:
The achievements of Peter Norton were disclosed in the 1987 Washington Post article as follows:
Peter Norton also authored the idea of ​​“personalizing” software promotion through the use of photographs of the same model for the entire product line (an idea that Symantec had acquired until now is used by Symantec for the entire product line). He is now known primarily for his role as a fashion model on Norton Utilities boxes and other Symantec products belonging to Norton Line. But in the old days, his company was very innovative, and loved Borland, Lotus and several other DOS startups.
Among their products were the famous Norton Guides: one of the first successful hypertext implementations (before the HTML era). Later implementations of Norton Commander (from version 3.0) use this help format. It seems to me that more than a dozen guides were created before the acquisition of the company by Symantec, and the total number of books that were converted into the NG format exceeded one hundred. Among the original guides were:
John Socha is the man who coined the term "screensaver". And maybe even created the first screensaver. In fact, the embryo screensaver (night sky with stars) was the second distinguishing feature of Norton Commander 3.0, along with two panels of blue background. This screen saver was called a classic DOS screensaver and was associated not with Norton, but with DOS. In 2001, Joe Forster wrote Starry Night, which accurately reproduces the classic Norton Commander screensaver. You can download and try it.
The first years of development of Norton Commander (1984-1988) were the years of the triumphal ascent of MS-DOS, as the most widely used operating system on the planet. She quickly changed her CP / M, and since the end of 1983, the tide "raises many boats": many software products created for MS-DOS became dominant in its class and even served as the de facto standard for porting to other operating systems. And this is not limited to working with spreadsheets, word processors, computer games. Utilities were also a fast-growing area. Crazy, stressful area. People experiencing tremendous pressure, the atmosphere of start-ups ... Many of them are already half-forgotten or completely forgotten. But it was the first software, the “gold rush” of which was later replayed in dot-coms in a slightly different manner.
The life of the superheroes of the DOS revolution and the subsequent gold rush of rivals is better than science fiction. Now such an intense atmosphere can be found only if in gaming companies. They did not invent anything new software, but they had the unique ability to develop high-quality software, along with the ability to enter the market with the product, to gradually make it better for it to become successful by creating a profitable business. The most successful of them had a unique combination of the qualities of a software developer, a deep understanding of the market, characteristic of a stockbroker.
Personal computers started selling in the late 70s. DOS at the time was almost empty, with the software in its most rudimentary state. The use of IBM mainframe software was very expensive (an hour cost about $ 70). And this situation has changed forever with the launch of DOS. The personal computer and the corresponding software for DOS is a rebellion against the established foundations, and the first DOS program entrepreneurs in this sense were revolutionaries who broke the old order. You can read about this period more in the book of Hard Drive by Bill Gates and in the “Microsoft Empire” by James Walls and Jim Erikson, published in 1993, when the memory of this period was not yet dispelled.
All the early players in this new industry were like Swiss knives in terms of personalities. They were able to work long hours as programmers and at the same time be excellent technical managers and architects. The atmosphere of the rat race of many students was well described in Bill Gates' Hard Drive, a book about the first years of Microsoft’s life.
Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me personally that John Soča later organized several successful startups. As one famous athlete once said: "The more I practice, the more fortunate I become." And this applies to all successful entrepreneurs of that period. These startups hired bright programmers who had to work crushingly long hours, with minimal control, but still in the team. And those who won were better and smarter. They sold customers high-quality products at lower prices. Most of these early DOS software entrepreneurs will be equally successful in other areas. Simply, they were at the right time in the right place and managed to push the “hard core” of the business to survive, outwit the competitors about to flourish. Peter Norton made an investment of less than $ 50,000 in 1982 at $ 70,000,000 in 1991 when he sold the company. However, he was of course a small player. Indeed, in 1995, he received 5 million, while Microsoft received in 1995 140.
It is interesting to note that initially Norton Commander had a strong contender, an opponent ahead of them with the release of version 1.0 and who dominated all reviews for another five years.
This is how Jeff Johnson recalled the events that led to the launch of the XTree in April 1985 (XTree was launched a year before Norton Commander):
Due to the immense popularity of Norton Commander, he had a great cultural influence. First of all, the word Norton has become synonymous with a good file manager. He also spawned a huge number of humorous stories:
About the incompatibility of Norton Commander and alcohol:
And this is a record of one of the newcomers to the quiz organized by me at the laboratory at the Kiev University of Economics and Commerce (which at that moment replaced all copies of the Norton Commander with the Volkov Commander in 1992-1994):
Drunk programmer is sitting open with Norton Commander on the screen. The C drive is open on both panels. “Well, why do I need two C disks with the same files?” He thought and erased all its contents by pressing F8 and Enter.
- an anecdote of the late 80s ( and I slammed a couple of folders when I was small - approx. Transl. )
Norton (Norton Commander) for DOS is a file manager for DOS, which existed in 5 major versions - 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and only the latest version has version 5.5. Many versions are still used by various enthusiasts and are on various sites on the Internet.
For example, the Symantec site contains the following FAQ section: “Does Norton Commander 1.0 / 2.0 support MS Windows NT 5 (Beta) operation?”
It was probably one of the most popular file managers in the era of the DOS operating system, which, along with XTree, broke with its roots DOS and in the form of other programs that inherit its functionality that exist on other operating systems.
The first version of NC 1.0 was developed by John Soch (Jonh Socha) in 1984-1989.
')
Starting with version 2, Norton Commander was a success comparable to 123, WordPerfect and MS Word, especially in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, where the blue screen of Norton Commander became synonymous with DOS. Many users have never even suspected that this is not the native interface of DOS, and in Russian the words “Norton” and “Commander” became part of the jargon of IT staff, and became, in fact, synonymous with the file manager.
Norton Commander was taught in classes in schools and institutes in most countries of the region of the former USSR, as well as European colleges and universities in eastern countries. This means that all graduates were more or less experienced users of Norton, which was the standard interface for DOS. And I would like to emphasize once again that many people did not even suspect that it was not part of DOS, but simply an additional utility. And the era of DOS has even affected the hiring process: the skill of using Norton Commander has become associated with using the DOS system in the minds of many hiring managers of IT specialists.
The very first version of the DOS shell was named VDOS (Visual DOS) and was written in a mixture of C and Assembler. As John Socha said, recalling past events:
I began work on what later became known as Norton Commander. In the fall of 1984, when I was still a graduate student in applied physics at Cornell University. The first versions were written entirely in Assembler. But this took too much time, so I soon switched to developing a mixture of C and Assembler, while most of the “real programmers” did not perceive C.
At that time I called it “Visual DOS” with the abbreviation VDOS instead of the usual two-letter abbreviations used at that time. The program itself was inspired by several things put together. Then I had a contract with Microsoft Press, according to which I had to write a few books and even spent some time at Bellevue, WA while working there. After which he took two months of graduate school and wrote a book.
The second book was supposed to be about small utilities that I used to use (for example, whereas, scrnsave, and others). But I never finished this book because of one utility, which I spent writing all my life.
John Socha received both MS and PhD in the direction of Applied Physics at Cornell University. After graduating from university, John became the first director of the research and development department of the now defunct Peter Norton Computing. He was the second programmer at the company and soon hired Brad Kingsberry.
At this time, Peter Norton Computing was a one-man show. It was founded by one of the pioneers of entrepreneurs in the development of commercial software. He created his first company in 1982 with $ 30,000 and an IBM computer (the company was sold to Symantec for 70 million in 1990). In 1992, the Smart Computing newspaper in the article “Investigating The Lost Files Of Peter Norton, PC Pioneer” Jillian Coolidge wrote:
The story goes that Peter Norton worked in the aerospace industry in the late 1970s, but he lost his job when Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed made large-scale reductions. To pay bills, Norton began to take part-time work under the contract.
One day, Norton accidentally deleted an important file, which was quite common and common to everyone, an error. Instead of re-entering all the information, he thought of writing a computer program that would recover the lost data. This program not only saved the lost file, but ultimately also helped to make Peter Norton a very rich, and very famous person.
Norton called his program Norton Utilities ...
It was 1982, and Norton launched the program through his company (in which only he worked), Peter Norton Computing Inc. (PNCI). And next year, PNCI released the second version of Norton Utilities, which actually consisted of several small utilities that saved the “lost” files and disk contents.
In 1984, PNCI received $ 1M dollars, and also released Norton Utilities version 3. At that time, three people worked for the company. However, he himself was engaged in all the development and writing of books, manuals and business. It is important to understand that in fact the company was a one-man show with some support staff. Because the income that was received from version 3.0 made it obvious: the company needs to be expanded. A programmer is required. Brad Kingsberry, who authored the NCD utility (which was later integrated into Norton Commander as NCD mode), recalls those days:
I joined Peter Norton Computing in 1985 as the company's first programmer. My previous employer had just closed its doors, so I sent my resume to several companies. Peter answered me and paid for the tickets to Seattle, where he rested on a summer vacation, after which he hired on the spot. And since Peter was still on vacation, I started working right from a hotel in Seattle and worked from there for the first two weeks. Further, over the next 6 months I worked from the PNCI kitchen table. When Eileen, Peter's wife, started cooking dinner, I understood that the work day was over and went home.
... My responsibilities were software development and that was what I was doing. After the employees of PNCI, there were already five people. Peter was engaged in the development, management, marketing and writing manuals from the den of his house. And three of his employees worked at the top.
Peter Norton has always been an easy-going person. His whole philosophy was reduced to a phrase that I constantly heard from him: “we will be engaged in this business while it is fun.” Because the main focus was to do something "cool" or "fun", and only then - money.
“I never knew what would have happened if we had not earned money, but the process itself would have been fun. Perhaps it would not have been so much fun, especially for Peter, ”says Kingsberry. “But he didn’t want to create the next generation of software, nor did he want to make a big pile of money. He really had fun, he loved flexibility and didn’t like working for someone. ”
PNCI has achieved revenue of $ 5 million. In 1986, he published several other software packages, but according to Peter, Norton’s utilities were still a cash cow. They are gaining increasing acceptance, and users have realized the benefits of data recovery.
Peter Norton, in fact, created a new class of software for personal computers: data recovery software. And, since this area was a profitable sector, it became clear that this would begin to attract competitors (PC Tools was the most outstanding). Quoting Peter Norton:
Why did Norton Utilities become such popular software? Industrial wisdom says: software is becoming popular either by providing superior capabilities, or by solving problems that were previously unsolvable. In 1982, when I sat down at my computer to write Unerase, I solved a common problem for which there were no solutions.
Peter Norton quickly realized that he had stumbled upon a gold mine and started doing business. This was one of the reasons he hired Kingsberry and Soch.
PNCI published several versions, each of which was more and more capable for almost a decade of its existence. Peter Norton was also a gifted writer, which was an important part of PR. He also wrote several books. His most influential book was co-authored with John Socha and was the best book to study Intel's Assembler for more than a decade. By the way, his famous quote: “Assembly language is an extravagant result of the work of human talent and you should avoid it wherever possible,” - from the 1986 edition.
The core of the Norton Utilities was the FAT Undelete utility, which allowed you to recover files if their clusters were not rewritten when creating new files. In the FAT system, in order to restore the file, it was enough to restore the first letter of the file name in the directory entry (this feature of the FAT file system was used by the DOS system, but was not documented). After the first release, Peter Norton made the Utilities Editor for PC Magazine. The package grew rapidly and the second version (ver. 4, 1986) contained more than 20 utilities (Brad Kingsberry took part in the development, since he was hired in the summer of 1985. He was a talented programmer and made many contributions to the development of utilities. An example would be ndd)
- nu , ud (UnRemove directory) and from version 4.0 qu (quick format) - a unique set of file recovery utilities for the FAT file system: “Norton Unility” and the directory recovery utility. One of the first in its class. Later, the implemented innovative method of recovering deleted files in FAT was the key to the successful launch of the company. Quick Unerase (qu) has been added to Norton Utilities 4.0
- fr (format Recover). It had to start from autoexec.bat with the / save command line parameter and wrote a special file frecover.dat to the disk, which created a duplicate of the file system system blocks and allowed to completely restore the file system after the format command.
- sd - the famous Speed ​​Disk - a pioneer in the issue of disk defragmentation and was one of the first utilities to optimize the file system.
- Ncd (Norton Change Directory) - a pioneer in navigating the file system as a hierarchical structure and contained a fast search algorithm. He entered a quick directory hierarchy search entered by XTree. This utility was first introduced in version 4.0 and was written by Brad Kingsberry
- In later versions, there was also a very interesting utility, called Norton Image , which allowed you to save critical system blocks on the hard disk in cases where the hard disk was suddenly disconnected or the system blocks were damaged
- Wipedisk and wipefile - utilities for permanently destroying information in a file or hard disk
Later, other successful programs were added:
- ndd - the famous Disk Doctor - for correcting errors in FAT (appeared in version 4.5 in 1988). Allowed to recover hard disks and floppy disks with bad sectors, errors and corrupted system blocks.
- ne - the famous Norton Disk Doctor Editor - a unique powerful utility for manually correcting errors and recovering files on hard drives.
- sf - Safe Format - allows you to format an external or internal hard disk so that you can quickly restore everything after formatting (in fact, it overwrites the old system sectors at the end of the disk).
The achievements of Peter Norton were disclosed in the 1987 Washington Post article as follows:
If you think, who is Peter Norton, then surely you think that this is a “person-disk”, or in extreme cases - a search engine for lost files ( like a profession, transl. ). This is not entirely fair. Norton spread enlightenment in other aspects of hardware and software. After all, only a small percentage of those who use a computer every day felt the daily need for a "Programming Guide" or in an "Asmembler Language Book". And if such a need arose, they always tend to first turn to Norton.
Peter Norton also authored the idea of ​​“personalizing” software promotion through the use of photographs of the same model for the entire product line (an idea that Symantec had acquired until now is used by Symantec for the entire product line). He is now known primarily for his role as a fashion model on Norton Utilities boxes and other Symantec products belonging to Norton Line. But in the old days, his company was very innovative, and loved Borland, Lotus and several other DOS startups.
Among their products were the famous Norton Guides: one of the first successful hypertext implementations (before the HTML era). Later implementations of Norton Commander (from version 3.0) use this help format. It seems to me that more than a dozen guides were created before the acquisition of the company by Symantec, and the total number of books that were converted into the NG format exceeded one hundred. Among the original guides were:
- The Assembly Language database , Copyright 1987 by Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was written by Craig Stinson, Brad Kingsbury, Kevin Goldstein, John Socha, and Peter Norton).
- The Turbo C Database , Copyright 1987, by Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was written by Deirdre Poeltler, Kevin Goldstein, Bruce F. Webster, John Socha, and Peter Norton.
- The Turbo Basic database , Copyright 1987 by Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was written by Craig Stinson, Burton L. Alperson, Brad Kingsbury, John Socha, and Peter Norton.
John Socha is the man who coined the term "screensaver". And maybe even created the first screensaver. In fact, the embryo screensaver (night sky with stars) was the second distinguishing feature of Norton Commander 3.0, along with two panels of blue background. This screen saver was called a classic DOS screensaver and was associated not with Norton, but with DOS. In 2001, Joe Forster wrote Starry Night, which accurately reproduces the classic Norton Commander screensaver. You can download and try it.
The first years of development of Norton Commander (1984-1988) were the years of the triumphal ascent of MS-DOS, as the most widely used operating system on the planet. She quickly changed her CP / M, and since the end of 1983, the tide "raises many boats": many software products created for MS-DOS became dominant in its class and even served as the de facto standard for porting to other operating systems. And this is not limited to working with spreadsheets, word processors, computer games. Utilities were also a fast-growing area. Crazy, stressful area. People experiencing tremendous pressure, the atmosphere of start-ups ... Many of them are already half-forgotten or completely forgotten. But it was the first software, the “gold rush” of which was later replayed in dot-coms in a slightly different manner.
The life of the superheroes of the DOS revolution and the subsequent gold rush of rivals is better than science fiction. Now such an intense atmosphere can be found only if in gaming companies. They did not invent anything new software, but they had the unique ability to develop high-quality software, along with the ability to enter the market with the product, to gradually make it better for it to become successful by creating a profitable business. The most successful of them had a unique combination of the qualities of a software developer, a deep understanding of the market, characteristic of a stockbroker.
Personal computers started selling in the late 70s. DOS at the time was almost empty, with the software in its most rudimentary state. The use of IBM mainframe software was very expensive (an hour cost about $ 70). And this situation has changed forever with the launch of DOS. The personal computer and the corresponding software for DOS is a rebellion against the established foundations, and the first DOS program entrepreneurs in this sense were revolutionaries who broke the old order. You can read about this period more in the book of Hard Drive by Bill Gates and in the “Microsoft Empire” by James Walls and Jim Erikson, published in 1993, when the memory of this period was not yet dispelled.
All the early players in this new industry were like Swiss knives in terms of personalities. They were able to work long hours as programmers and at the same time be excellent technical managers and architects. The atmosphere of the rat race of many students was well described in Bill Gates' Hard Drive, a book about the first years of Microsoft’s life.
Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me personally that John Soča later organized several successful startups. As one famous athlete once said: "The more I practice, the more fortunate I become." And this applies to all successful entrepreneurs of that period. These startups hired bright programmers who had to work crushingly long hours, with minimal control, but still in the team. And those who won were better and smarter. They sold customers high-quality products at lower prices. Most of these early DOS software entrepreneurs will be equally successful in other areas. Simply, they were at the right time in the right place and managed to push the “hard core” of the business to survive, outwit the competitors about to flourish. Peter Norton made an investment of less than $ 50,000 in 1982 at $ 70,000,000 in 1991 when he sold the company. However, he was of course a small player. Indeed, in 1995, he received 5 million, while Microsoft received in 1995 140.
It is interesting to note that initially Norton Commander had a strong contender, an opponent ahead of them with the release of version 1.0 and who dominated all reviews for another five years.
This is how Jeff Johnson recalled the events that led to the launch of the XTree in April 1985 (XTree was launched a year before Norton Commander):
A few months later, we had hundreds of floppy disks and several hard drives packed with files. And we didn't have the slightest idea where things were. We had no way to manage these files at least somehow, and this is where my story begins.
As you can see, there was no way to manage files. At least there wasn’t a simple enough way to do this: there wasn’t any utility for this task. There were CP / M utilities that were written by our friend, Mike Karas, that we used. And some console-oriented programs. But none of them was aimed at managing the directory structure.
It made us all take a deep breath ...
So we started thinking about it, started talking to each other about it. We shouted at each other because of this and threatened each other with ancient Klinogorsk curses. In other words, we sat down as adults and began to reason.
We discussed various types of tree structures, recursive processing, and other technical issues. Drawings and diagrams came and went, like a garbage can in the kitchen.
Among the ideas discussed were, for example, how the program would represent the DOS directory structure and how the program would display them on the screen. I drew it on the board. It was like a tree that needs water ( apparently, it means that it grows in its side and lies on the ground, - approx. Transl. ). But no one believed that this could be done. “Impossible,” they said.
Famous, last words.
I went home on Friday and programmed like crazy until Sunday, after which I showed the result to Harry on Monday. A week later, we decided to try to display the tree in the backup program we wrote for Epson. They liked it. We had the beginnings of our own product.
In December 1984, we started over what you know as XTree. Our wish list for TODO was huge and many of the desired features never made it to the release. However, they were added later, in XTree and XTree Pro Gold. I worked full-time on the program, while Ken worked on it between the rest of the tasks. When the program was written enough to use it, we began to use it. We felt that if other people relied on it, it should be easy to learn and full of functions to help with the work.
If you don’t think this is obvious, I don’t want you to think that some kind of insane genius did everything himself. Far from it. Every time you try to do something that no one has done before, a lot of people are involved.
So it was with XTree. Dale was involved in controlling the features that were part of the product. That he was explosive in features. Henry controlled that we didn't write bad code. Tom controlled us to make a clear user interface (his tireless work ensured consistency in the product interface. And it was really appreciated by hundreds and millions of users. Every time we thought that the XTree was ready, Tom always pointed out that it was possible to further refine ). And finally, Ken. He was a great tester.
In the end, all that remains to be done is to come up with a name.
For many months, sitting in the office, we came up with many names, but could not agree. And one night, my wife offered an XTree. “X-Tree ... X-Tree ... read about it!”
Quite silly, as it seemed to me at the beginning, but I still wrote it down to me.
When I got to the office, I told everyone about it and everyone answered me: “somehow stupid,” but we left the name.
Great, now we had a name, there was a program, and we had a problem: how do we drag it into the stores so that people like you could buy it, and we could do this on * lillions of dollars? At that time, we had only two options: we could publish it ourselves, or we could find someone who knew more about this issue than we did: in 1985 there were not many people who understood at least something about this issue. .
On March 1, 1985, we made the decision to publish the XTree on our own. At the time of the madness, and while at West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, Dale took responsibility and promised that XTree was completely ready.
All manuals are written, printed and that all hundreds of parts that could only be fully prepared within 30 days. As it seemed then, we took on an unbearable burden and World Fool's Day was an excellent choice for our premiere.
The only thing we didn't know was that Dave had an ace up his sleeve: Michael Cahlin, president of Cahlin / Williams Communications.
Over the next four weeks, Kahlin had a finished product, packaging design, printed materials, press materials for publications. The first XTree brochure is “read all about XTree”. And along with Dale Sinor and Judy Mason, a stand was set up on the shore of West Coast Computer Faire.
Due to the immense popularity of Norton Commander, he had a great cultural influence. First of all, the word Norton has become synonymous with a good file manager. He also spawned a huge number of humorous stories:
“Comrades, we must abandon the false values ​​that our enemies have instilled! The fact that a Windows GUI user is happier than a command line user is like a drunk one is happier than a sober one. ”
About the incompatibility of Norton Commander and alcohol:
Drunk programmer is sitting open with Norton Commander on the screen. The C drive is open on both panels. “Well, why do I need two C disks with the same files?” He thought and erased all its contents by pressing F8 and Enter.
And this is a record of one of the newcomers to the quiz organized by me at the laboratory at the Kiev University of Economics and Commerce (which at that moment replaced all copies of the Norton Commander with the Volkov Commander in 1992-1994):
Q: What is the name of the operating system in which you performed the task?
A: Volkov Commander.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/247399/
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