Norton Desktop was his time fast forward. It was a great solution to work with. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

I spent ages clicking around Windows 3 trying to work out how make icons for my own DOS apps. I remember spending loads of time on something called Object Packager before realizing it wasn't what I wanted; so often that was the case with early Windows, it had options to do things no one wanted and ludicrously missed options that plenty of people would have liked. Your batch file editing video idea sounds great.

@Eyetrauma

Ай бұрын

I think that’s what the PIF Editor is for, isn’t it? You create a .pif, then add the link to Program Manager IIRC?

@SirKenchalot

Ай бұрын

@@Eyetrauma I used he PIF editor but don't think you could create a custom icon or assign one if you'd designed it somewhere.

I really like the look of Norton Desktop for DOS, as I'm a sucker for text-mode interfaces that use custom VGA characters to make it looks like it's in graphics mode. Excited for Central Point Desktop!

@OCTAGRAM

Ай бұрын

Check Acronis OS Selector 5.0

@Boxing_Gamer

27 күн бұрын

Textmode interfaces just rules

The Norton batch builder definitely deserves its own video.

@eugiblisscast

Ай бұрын

I agree!

First time introduced to Windows 3.x was in October of 1992, I was 9 years old. Never had issues with the environment. Very easy for me. Windows 3.11 fWG was my main os until July 1998 when my father bought a PII with Windows 95OSR2.5.

Considering how shitty Windows 11's UI is, I guess alternative shells for Windows are very needed.

I did not remember this but once the Disk Doctor animation came up I remembered it all. Ironically I instantly remembered the DOS version.

I had Norton Utilities and Norton Editor on my computer at the office. Great tools I couldn't live without. Never found an editor that fitted me like a glove like NE.

I'm loving this series on alternate Windows shells; I've never seen Norton Desktop before! I look forward to next week's video. I would love to see more on Norton Batch Builder as well. As I've said previously, all this software is a bit before my time, so it's super interesting to look back on it. Thank you!

As a kid, I was a huge fan of Quikmenu for DOS which has been on a shareware CD-ROM my dad bought back in the day. It felt nice, even had its own wallpapers and could easily be navigated using just the keyboard.

I remember this one. But I mostly used Borland Dashboard before going to OS/2 2_1. Cheers!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Oh, I didn't know this one. Sounds interesting as well!

Great video, I like those old software reviews....I use them all of the time as it's kind of a hobby for me to collect them an try them as well on vm's as on real hardware...well done... another one please 🙂

I was a huuuuuuuuge Norton fan back then (especially DOS: Norton Utilities and Norton Commander, plus Norton Speeddrive as cache) and of course I also wanted to have Norton Desktop 3 for WIndows, promising to be more productive. It was not really good in my opinion. Yes it had tons of features, but it has drawbacks: for example, yes, it converts GRP groups from Program Manager to ND at install (and you can do that later also). But: then you are stuck: if you install any more WIndows programm, ND will not add the new icons, you always had to do that yourself, absolutely not comfortable. And I know it was programmatically possible even back then to intercept Program Manager creating new icons when a SETUP program wanted to do it, so no idea, why they didn't implement it. So the only comfortable way was to install NDW as the last program. Good idea, not a well done implementation. By the way I loved the design of Norton DOS tools so much (NDD, NU, NB, ...) that my own DOS programs also implemented the design, which I straightly cloned in Borland Pascal back then. :)

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Indeed, the addition of programs was badly done. Though, to be fair, also other sheel replacements suffered from the same issue, even the very popular Calmira didn't hook into the registration facility. The latter at least provided an import function, to load newly created Program Manager groups into Calmira's startmenu.

@OCTAGRAM

Ай бұрын

You should check Acronis OS Selector 5.0

Yes, please do a deep dive on windows batch files from Norton Desktop!

Love these videos. Up until this very moment, I never thought about how odd it is that Microsoft never really evolved batch files for Windows in any meaningful way.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

28 күн бұрын

You‘re welcome! As for the batch files, frankly the NT CMD.EXE batch files (.cmd) were more evolved than COMMAND.COM batch files (.bat). And with PowerShell (.ps) you have actually a very powerful scripting facility at hands. And the latter is not restricted to just system commands, ie. You can also automate Excel, just as an example. Plus Microsoft has Visual Basic for Applications included in their Office products since 1993. With all of this, there was likely no need to evolve the plain batch files, as there was plenty of (better) alternatives already. It all depends on what you want to achieve in the end.

D.O.S. release user here; I remember it as a cool looking piece of utilities suite back in the early 90s.What was super cool was the fact that it ran in graphical mode with detailed shadows and GUI effects (for that era of course).To me the D.O.S. version looked better than the win 3.1 version.

I absolutely loved NDW 3.0 and ran it on my Packard Bell Legend MultiMedia 486-SX/25 back in the day right up until midnight the day Windows 95 came out. :-) Today I'm running NDW version3.0 on a Pentium 266MMX w/ Windows for Workgroups (3.11) and also NDW 2.2 on a Compaq Portable III - 286 12mhz w/ Windows 3.1. ITS FREAKIN AWESOME! Thanks so much for creating your video. There's not a lot out there regarding NDW so I love it when new videos get posted. Really nice job!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Thanks a lot. You‘re welcome!

I used Norton Desktop 3.0 on our first PC, a Pentium 60 with resolutions up to 1600x1200. It was extremely fast and I enjoyed it very much. Then one day someone copied the 14 diskettes of Windiws 95 for me. I still miss Norton Desktop.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

29 күн бұрын

That must have been a super highend graphics card back then. Mine barely handled 800x600 at 256 colors … ;)

@Soso-km8er

27 күн бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR It was a Matrox card. Problem was an extremely poor DOS performance “The MGA Millennium card from Matrox was designed to be a Windows 2D GUI accelerator, providing blazing fast 2D performance with a crisp output. It could reach resolutions of 1600 x 1200 in 16.7 million colours with the full complement of 8 MB of RAM, and up to 200 Hz refresh rate.”

This video revived an old memory. You ever hear of some software called Plug-in for Windows? No, not a plug-in, but that's just what the software was called. It added nested groups to Program Manager itself and let you decorate your title bars with a clock and other things. Seems like it might be something you'd like to check out and maybe make a video on.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Indeed, that would be interesting to see. Not sure if this is actually the one? archive.org/details/PLUGIN10_ZIP

@ZipplyZane

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR The description sounds right.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

@ZipplyZane Just gave it a try, I think it's exactly the software you meant. Nice thing, and very leightweight, too.

I still use Total Commander, a Norton Commander inspired file manager. I couldn’t get by without it. My fingers are just wired to the navigation much like vim.

While I have used Norton Commander, I never encountered Norton Desktop. Note also: some CP/M, and many early PC titles, listed the function key values on the lowest line of the screen. And then, there was Wordstar ... Which put the commands at the top....

They put a lot of effort into the advanced TUI framework for Nortons Utilities so I'm not surprised they seem to have used it for some other things like Norton Desktop for DOS. Text mode dos applications trying to be Windows like always fascinated me

When I first got into working on computers. I went on a service call to a customer house to fix a windows 3.1 machine. On it he had a software that turned the shell into what basically looked just like a Mac. He was surprised I didn't really know how to work around it. I thought it was Symantec or Norton desktop. But, I have yet to find it. I do remember finding an advertisement for it some place years ago. One more thing I remember to a point is Microsoft didn't like companies doing that. So they put in more block to stop it. Though, I can't remember if it was both Windows 95 and Xp or just XP.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

There isn‘t too many options from that period, either Norton Desktop or Central Point Desktop, which were very somewhat similar and inspired by Macintosh System.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

… Microsoft established those guidelines with Windows95, prohibiting 3rd party UI modifications or replacements.

@idahofur

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yea that might have been it. It also doesn't help that all ended up into one company either.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

@@idahofur true. In my opinion, Symantec killed the better product off. Though in the end, it was meaningless, as with Win 95, the days of custom shells were over.

I had EGA and used ND with Win32s. I recall using MathCAD 6

1:57 There was a backup application in MS-DOS 2.11 and I used the backup utility version in 3.3 to read the backup files from the 2.11 within DOS 6.22 using SETVER. Did Microsoft remove backup from version 5.0?!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

My bad. I seem to have overlooked it somehow... Thanks for pointing it out.

my experience with 3.11 was on my first pc that I bought, a 386 with a monochrome hercules display (which was old at that time, my family already had a P2). I desperately wanted to have VB installed there as well, but never had the means to get it. this norton desktop would've been a really step up to absolutely anything provided on 3.11. I think I'll make a vm and install it.

Reminds me of the old norton commander for dos.... forgot about that software

This was a power user option, when Windows 3.1 was a big deal, and it really was a big deal. Windows 95 hit the stratosphere and doesn't compare to the "big" software of today. Whereas 3.1 is basically equivalent to anything we've talked about lately, like Windows 11 or whatever Android is out.

Norton Commander-like would also mean F5=Copy, F4=Edit, F3=View, F6=Move/Rename, F7=CreateDir, F8=Delete... but ND uses different F functions. So very bad :(...

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Indeed, that surprised me as well, that they did it so close, but still deviated from the NC.

Nice video! I did not use this back then but was aware of it. Norton products were great until they turned into bloat in the 2000s. As for Norton Desktop on Mac I don't recall ever seeing anything like that and I was a Mac user. It is listed as "Norton Desktop for Apple". It could be it was a version for Apple II computers as that is often what it means when a listing states "Apple" and not "Mac" or "Macintosh". I would think that if it was for Macintosh it would have been listed as "Norton Desktop for Macintosh". Just a thought.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Yeah, as long as I don‘t get hold of it, it will remain a mystery, which Apple system it was targeted for.

Love your videos. Would you be able to do them in full screen? The VM box is very distracting.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Sure, let me see what I can do. It'll take a few "weeks" though, as several upcoming videos are preproduced already.

@WhatALoadOfTosca

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR here, only if it is convenient and suits you. The videos are already great. Ps I’d love to see more of a deep dive in to the dos version.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

@@WhatALoadOfTosca don‘t worry, tgere‘s surely an easy way to improve it without too many hassles. Of course it‘s concenient to throw the footage into the timeline, but addibng a scale effect and a crop is not that big a thing. These are just thing one usually doesn‘t think about unless someone points it out.

Can you create .exe or .bat applications with Scriptmaker/Batch Builder that will run on Windows natively?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

No, it remains interpreted only.

Looking at these very old GUI File Managers reminds me of just why I chose the Macintosh back then. Apple got everything right before they let everything fall apart.

Norton Desktop for DOS looks like it followed the UI guidelines of Visual Basic for DOS. Perhaps they even used VB to develop it?

@hyoenmadan

Ай бұрын

Ejem... Visual Basic for DOS "guidelines" are Windows UI ones (Win2.x btw). And ofc no, they didn't used VB for DOS kek. It was practically a toy even for 90's standards, sluggish, clunky and unreliable. Symantec back then had their set of compilers, developer tools and UI library toolkits based around C(much like Borland). That's what they used for both their DOS and Windows products. You can even build your own DOS applications which look like Norton stuff by using Zortech C built in UI library. As side effect, these tools allowed cross compilation and code portability with the Macintosh, were Zortech C (later rebranded to Symantec C and then Digital Mars C) was also available. Ofc, only if you used their library toolkit.

I personally really liked NDOS a command/shell replacement which licensed from 4DOS.

What about Borton Desktop version 3.0 for Windows 3.x?

I really liked Norton Desktop. When win95 came out I would have preferred Norton over the 95 desktop but, alas, it was not to be.

How was this meant for Windows 3.1, which came in '92, if it launched in '91? Isn't it more like it was meant for Win 3.0 but also worked with 3.1?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

21 күн бұрын

Yes, you‘re right. Changed the title. Thanks for the input.

@BilisNegra

21 күн бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR My pleasure. I didn't really expect to get a reply from the author himself. Thanks for what you do in this awesome channel!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

21 күн бұрын

@@BilisNegra My pleasure. I always try to respond whenever possible.

So the person that the Norton anti-malware software was named after is named Peter Norton?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

29 күн бұрын

Yes. Peter Norton (who founded Peter Norton Computing) sold his company to Symantec in 1990. Symantec and Peter Norton had a deal allowing them to use his likeness and name for continuity on their product names and brands, even though he himself wasn‘t actually actively involved any more.

is there any norton desktop for windows 11?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

25 күн бұрын

Nope. Norton Desktop was pulled of the market 20 years ago. There is however still alternative shells for Windows today, including Windows 11. Check this out: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows

I hope you have a time to review DOS Navigator by Rit Labs some day. It was far superior than Norton Commander, yet intuitive to work with.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

24 күн бұрын

Yes, I indeed intend to look into Norton Commander and the many clones of it.

I’m looking forward for your review of CPS; imho it’s better than Norton Desktop for Windows.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Fully agree. Although I never used either of the two, and I like NDW, CPS is just that tiny little bit better.

You can use emulators for such showcases, but please choose a lower tier CPU since your emulations are running at 20-40% speed!

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Emulation speed is just fine on this machine. It drops during the recording, because OBS Studio eats lots of CPU for the live video encoding, and this has a countereffect on the emulation. For the sake of showcasing, this performance drop is mostly irrelevant. I‘m not trying to win a speed race here.

Ok, so Ron Jeremy in the Easter Egg has to be a spoof, right? RIGHT?

Norton Desktop for Apple? I must find.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Tell me should you succeed. I failed locating it. Seems like a ghost to me.

@arlandi

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR like a Norton Ghost?

Can we get back to the times where Norton software was actually useful and not garbage that slows your computer down?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

I wish we could ... :,-(

But does it work on windows ME?? ;-)

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Oh my… how could I miss that? ;)

It was the best.

Why don't you use the shell from windows 95?

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

There was no official Win95 shell backport for Windows 3.1. There was open source Calmira, which isnupcomong. And then there was the Win95 shell backport, aka NewShell for Windows NT 3.51. Check out my previous video on that, it‘s in the linked playlist in the video descripton.

You should not run your emulator with configuration that your host is unable to emulate at 100% speed. During your whole video, i see it around 15-35%. Don't you find everything in VM really sluggish? I saw the VM bios show pentium II 450 as cpu. You should obviously dial it down. Maybe to pentium 1 mmx or something.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Emulation speed is just fine on this machine. It drops during the recording, because OBS Studio eats lots of CPU for the live video encoding, and this has a countereffect on the emulation. For the sake of showcasing, this performance drop is mostly irrelevant. I‘m not trying to win a speed race here.

@GigAHerZ64

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR got it. Though, emulating P II 450 (for win 3 machine!) does suggest otherwise on the speed racing topic. :D I suggested you to use *slower* cpu for your emulated machine.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

@@GigAHerZ64 not really, just lazyness. It‘s a blueprint VM I copy and reuse all over the place, good enough to roughly span the 90s period.

Norton desktop for DOS is very unstable in my opinion. I stick with the Norton Commander

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Agree. Norton Desktop for DOS doesn‘t make much sense for me. NC is a better file manager, and the rest it more or less covers as well.

@intel386DX

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Dos Navigator as well, many features ,but very unstable and heavy on slow PCs

When you are showing things on screen can't you full screen your emulator so we can look at a more original experience. It is very distracting to have the modern UI elements above and below the vintage software running in the middle. I notice you do this in most videos.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

This is a feedback I just happened to receive already. I will certainly consider this for an improvement.

@joetheman74

29 күн бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Glad to hear you are open to suggestions. Your channel is beginning to improve and become among the better vintage computer channels. Keep up the good work.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

29 күн бұрын

@@joetheman74 Sure. I defenitely prefer if someone’s stating what they dislike. That‘s feedback I can work with :) Though bear with me, some videos are preproduced already. So I will only start to incorporate change into the ones coming from June onwards.

I'm not impressed, where is the right mouse button support? 😕

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Context Menus were not in wide use by 1991. Windows 3.x didn't have it at all by default. Some applications (including Microsoft Office) started exploring the concept as early as 1990, but it was always homebrewn implementations and remained exceptional until much later. As far as NDW is concerned, it didn't have it until Version 3.0 (1993), and still then only in some rare spots. Central Point Desktop for Windows (subject of next episode), used the context menus a lot better and more on par to what we're accustomed to on the present day.

@ruben_balea

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I know, my first computer came with Olivetti MS-DOS 3.30a and Windows 3.0 and then I upgraded it to Olivetti MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 Since a 386 was enough to use Word and play a lot of point&click games and I *hate FPS and FMV* games I only wanted a new computer many years later to play Age of Empires and Commandos so I jumped from 3.1 to 98 SE with native support for a lot of buttons and the scroll wheel.

you don’t have to do all this now. we have windows 11 that does everything. you can throw this away now.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Sure, but that‘s not the point when looking into historic software…

@jessihawkins9116

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR but you can run all this stuff in VMware on windows 11

Clickbait title. It doesn't look like ND did all that much that was really required. Just having bunch of features doesn't mean these features were all that useful. Even the file explorer isn't of the Norton Commander style but ripoff of original file explorer and there is no taskbar - the biggest missing features of Win3.x that at times necessitated to either use Alt+Tab or minimizing or moving currently opened windows to switch tasks. Also - and this is very important - software like this would use more computer resources. On hardware where you already had issues with memory size adding bigger program manager replacement wouldn't really help your Windows being more useful.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

Agreed, one would propably not run this on weaker machines, like you wouldn't run Windows 95 on any such a low-end machine for the very much same reason either. Still, on a 486-class machine, I see no reason not to use Norton Desktop if one were convinced to take a benefit from the feature set. Wether these additions were useful or not, lies in eyes of the beholder after all. Btw, at the time this product was current, there was no such concepts anyway around like the Taskbar. I can only guess that when NDW came out, maybe anyone was still content with just having mimized icons, or the taskswitcher (ALT-TAB) or the tasklist (CTRL-ESC). Wether noone thought of a better way to this point, or wether there were prohibitions by Microsoft, who knows? Allegedly Microsoft started working on the next-generation UI somewhen in the 1992/3-ish timeline.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

P.S. on the clickbait notion: I disagree. I believe I'm telling a good showcase story on a historic piece of software here, and after all, I truely believe Norton Desktop was a useful addition the stock Windows 3.1 and greatly enhanced it. Even though, personally I like Central Point Desktop (part of PC Tools for Windows) just a tiny little bit better, and I will furtherly explore in the next episode as to why that is.

@MrAranton

Ай бұрын

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR The origin of the Norton Desktop (and similar programs) was back in the day when operating systems were still strictly command line interface, which isn't exactly user friendly. The first versions of Norton Commander were a simple graphical file-manager that made computers easier to use because you didn't need to memorize commands and the filetree of the computer. As such it faced stiff competition, when Microsoft included the DOS Shell starting MS-DOS 4.0, and Windows 3.x effectively killed off that niche of the market, because it was a real GUI, not just a text-based one. In response to that Norton and its clones started to add more and more features - which kept them afloat and useful for a while, but eventually Windows did everything and more the Norton Desktop did, but better For my part I never saw much use for such programms. I got my first computer for christman in 1991 or 1992. A couple of months later an uncle gave me copy of PC-Tools for my birthday. By that time I was so familiar using DOS to do whatever I needed to do, loading up any kind of graphical interface seemed like unnecessary extra step. At the time I did some of my homework for school using MS-Works. Launching it by typing "works" was easier than typing "win" waiting for a couple of minutes, navigate to C:\works, look of works.exe, double-click on it and deal with greatly decreased performance, because whatever memory was devoted to windows couldn't be devoted to run Works.

@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR

Ай бұрын

​@@MrAranton Batch files and/or doskey, I guess?

@user-qd9pg8xt2k

Ай бұрын

​@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORMy dad bought both Norton Desktop then Central Point.. I liked Central Point better. This started me down the rabbit hole of alternative shells ending with LightStep before fully moving to Linux in 2001 (Gentoo).