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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: He does some philanthropy and collects art, but the article doesn't say anything more about that.

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Also

> Norton AntiVirus, which eventually became the best-known Norton-branded product

If you ask me, this was, and always will be, Norton Commander. Anti-viruses are a dime a dozen, and Norton's didn't outshine others. But the two-column sub-columnized folder display - which NC either invented or perfected - was a UI design gem.

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I know somebody who worked in the arts in NYC a while back and went to a party hosted at Peter's place. Apparently he has a wild art collection.

My name is also Peter Norton and so in the 90s I was introduced to this Peter F. Norton because he had bought the art of, and stayed in touch with one of the cofounders of the internet 1.0 company where I worked (whose name was also Peter).

He said that he was happy because he had always had art in his life, so when he sold his company and embarked on a life as an art collector (he was the premier collector of southern California art for a while iirc) he was very happy with his life.

One time in Georgetown Seattle, the guy who ran the fantagtaphics store recognized my name. For a while the other Peter F Norton was talking with MS (remember when they stole the disk defragmenter and didn't pay for it?), and this guy, he ran an art gallery near what is now the art museum, and Peter would apparently budget to just buy a bunch of art from his gallery each visit. So his art collection was always a passion and always a part of him.

Midnight Commander and FAR Manager are two apps that at least some years ago were continuing that concept.

Midnight Commander (mc) is still going strong. I use it every day and it's in most distros.

I use Midnight commander every day on Linux in text mode. On Windows and Linux desktop I use Total Commander and Double Commander respectively.

FAR is still alive and well - more faithful to Norton Commander than Midnight commander. Very popular in Russia, for obvious reasons. I worked with some Russian colleagues (in the US). Every one of them used FAR.

Those are just clones of the exact same app. If you look at graphical FTP and SFTP clients - many of them use this basic layout.

Also, one could also mention "Windows Commander" which is a non-FOSS NC-like program (for Windows).

> If you ask me, this was, and always will be, Norton Commander. Anti-viruses are a dime a dozen, and Norton's didn't outshine others.

Norton AntiVirus was the one I remember seeing prominently displayed at CompUSA or Circuit City back when you bought software as book-sized boxes containing disk(ette)?s in the 90s. You could find Norton Utilities, but when PCs became big with the general public around the early to mid 90s, Norton AntiVirus was clearly a moneymaker.

Pathminder appears to have predated Norton Commander by a couple of years, tough I've never used it.

As a former Amiga user I'm compelled to argue the ones who perfected this was Disk Master and Directory Opus ;) Directory Opus is still available, now for Windows, but looks nothing like the early versions and frankly I don't like the modern versions.

Personally I preferred Disk Master II [1], which by default kept the two directory listings and a command palette, but instead of making them fixed like most file managers of the era (including the previous version of Disk Master [2]), the directory listings and the command palette were all windows, and you could configure the layout and which commands were included so you could e.g. have it execute your own scripts and the like (I'm sure most gui file managers have that today - at the time it wasn't at all ubiquitous).

EDIT: AmigaOS also had CLImate which used a similar two-pane system, and which came out about the same time as Norton, but CLImate was very primitive and marred by the developers seemingly wanting to make full use of the available fonts provided with AmigaOS - note the at least three different fonts on the buttons [3] - and way too much padding taking space from the directory listings.

[1] http://myplace.frontier.com/~jodytierney/dm2.html (click on the image for a bigger version) shows a customised DM II setup.

[2] https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/411586853453284894/

[3] http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?s=2b3fea62abf55fc52bffc7...

It was good, but by the time NC was around I was already using a shareware tool called Stereo Shell that I liked better.

There's some screenshots here:

https://www.danielsays.com/ssg-dossw-ss410.html

I think about Stereo Shell every time I use Pathfinder on my Mac.

Norton Commander sure left a legacy that remains alive to this day.

I never used the original myself, but I've used (and continue to use) a number of file managers that copied it, both terminal and GUI versions.

ndos was a pretty nice dos alternative too, though I eventually settled on drdos

Ndos was a command.com alternative, not a DOS replacement like DRDos. It was based on 4DOS, and yes, it was a giant leap upwards, not unlike the experience that the Fish shell provides today.

oh, right you are! it's been a while :)

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