Where have you gone, Peter Norton?

Peter Norton was my hero way back in the late 80&#x27;s to early 90&#x27;s.<p>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.<p>Then I used DiskEdit to bypass copy protection hacking the byte codes.<p>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)<p>Such memomories, DiskEdit and SideKick were my two must have utilities in the days of DOS

Which reminds me that to this day there is no good replacement for Norton Commander (for UNIX systems, of course).<p>Please, don&#x27;t even start mentioning Midnight Commander. It is nowhere near as good. Oh, sure, it has a bazillion fancy features, but it just doesn&#x27;t work that well, isn&#x27;t as smooth as the original was. Remember, kids, not every file manager that has two panes can be called a &quot;Norton Commander replacement&quot;!<p>Those of us who grew up using Norton Commander still look at the redesigned (&quot;improved&quot;) numpads on modern keyboards and shake their head in horror and disbelief, remapping those keys to what they Should Be.

Disassembling the Norton Utilities and annotating them was an excellent way to learn how to program X86, I&#x27;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 &#x27;gnu base utils&#x27; but instead of in C a good chunk of it (if not all) was in assembler.<p>It&#x27;s a pity the article does not really answer the question in the title, Peter is simply getting older (he&#x27;s probably in his 70&#x27;s now). Here he is at some function a few years ago, looking happy and well:<p><a href="http://i558.photobucket.com/albums/ss23/Image-Gallery/norton.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i558.photobucket.com&#x2F;albums&#x2F;ss23&#x2F;Image-Gallery&#x2F;norton...</a><p>I wish him a very long life and much joy, he&#x27;s done a ton of good for the PC industry and his books on low level PC stuff were quite useful.

Midnight Commander lives on :)<p>For those unfamiliar, it&#x27;s a remake of the Norton Commander for Linux &#x2F; Unix: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Norton_Commander</a>

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&#x27;t even start programming until he was 30.

This article poses a question it never really answers to one&#x27;s satisfaction

Peter Norton&#x27;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.

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.<p>There is also a line of enterprise products dubbed &quot;Symantec Antivirus&quot; that reduces royalties even further.

Too bad that these days Symantec&#x2F;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&#x2F;Symantec AV is best called crapware these days.<p>First thing I do on every client&#x27;s computer is remove Norton&#x2F;Symantec, solves about 50% of the &quot;why is my PC slow&quot; questions

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.<p>Ahh, I am getting old.

Anyone remember the Norton Editor? One of the first commercial text editors. And actually decent for it&#x27;s time.

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

Norton ghost was quite awesome. It was the poor man&#x27;s VM.

It&#x27;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.

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

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

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

But what about <i>NORMAN</i> Antivirus?