How the Norton Desktop made Windows 3.x more usable!

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?

@@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 agree!

Check Acronis OS Selector 5.0

Textmode interfaces just rules

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

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

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR The description sounds right.

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

Thanks a lot. You‘re welcome!

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.

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.

You should check Acronis OS Selector 5.0

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

@@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.”

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.

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

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

@@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.

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

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

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

@@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.

@@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.

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

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.

No, it remains interpreted only.

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.

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

@@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!

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

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

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

Oh my… how could I miss that? ;)

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.

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

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

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR like a Norton Ghost?

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.

I wish we could ... :,-(

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.

@@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.

@@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.

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.

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

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.

@@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.

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

@@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.

@@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.

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

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

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.

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.

@@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.

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

​@@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).