- #NORTON DISK DOCTOR DOUBLE MANUAL#
- #NORTON DISK DOCTOR DOUBLE SOFTWARE#
- #NORTON DISK DOCTOR DOUBLE PC#
When Norton software switched to Windows, along with the entire utility industry, it got more bloated and tended to go after a larger, more consumery, less nerdy audience. No disrespect meant to later, Windows-based Norton products–they’ve rescued my computer on more than one occasion–but for me, the golden age of Peter Norton’s software was when it was mostly DOS-based, lightning fast, and let you dig deeply into your computer.
I also swore by NCACHE and Speed Disk, two utilities which were superior to their Microsoft equivalents. I used both of them more than once to recover from disaster, back when hard disks crashed a lot more often than they do today. I was particularly fond of Disk Doctor, which repaired corrupted hard drives and Disk Editor, which let you view and edit the data on your disk byte-by-byte. I started using MS-DOS PCs on a regular basis in 1991, and that’s when I became a user of Norton software. (Don’t hold me to this, but I could swear that at least one version of the Norton Utilities sported an interface featuring an animated version of Peter.) (I’d forgotten that he didn’t wear glasses all along, at least when posing for photographs: Once he did, it added to his authoritative air.)Īnd here, in an image which I find vaguely unsettling, is a folded-arm, pink-shirt Norton in a very early (1991) ad for Norton AntiVirus, which eventually became the best-known Norton-branded product:Įsther, who seems to have done a better job of holding onto interesting computer-industry tchotchkes than I have, still has her Peter Norton Mug:Īs the image below, which I borrowed from this blog post, shows, cross-armed Norton was not only iconic, but also a computer icon.
#NORTON DISK DOCTOR DOUBLE MANUAL#
Here, on a Norton manual cover, is the folded-arm Norton as he’s remained burned into my brain all these years. He was a pro, but he was also ready to get to work on whatever ailed your computer. Here it is in an early incarnation, on a best-selling 1985 tome which Wikipedia informs me was known as the “pink shirt book.”īoth the formality of the necktie and the rolled-up sleeves of the classic Norton pose are meaningful. (In the 1990s, a friend of mine wrote a book with Norton: By then, I gathered, writing a book with Peter Norton involved…well, pretty much writing a book.)Īnd all along, that image of a thoughtful-looking computer nerd with crossed arms was instantly recognizable.
#NORTON DISK DOCTOR DOUBLE PC#
And then, in 1990, he sold Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, which made the Norton line of software even more successful.Īfter the sale, Peter Norton himself retained a high profile as a living symbol of PC maintenance his personal brand was so powerful that it transcended his actual involvement in products which bore his name. Norton’s empire grew to include multiple software products, articles (including a long-running PC Magazine column), and books. Its killer app: UnErase, which could recover lost files back before trashcan-style deletion let you change your mind after getting rid of a file. Norton was a mainframe and minicomputer programmer who bought an IBM PC soon after its 1981 release and published an enormously successful suite of software tools, the Norton Utilities, in 1982. I found seeing him again–even without his own head–to be a surprisingly Proustian experience. It’s the torso, rolled-up sleeves and folded arms of Peter Norton, the man who was once synonymous with PC utility software, on a vintage shirt produced to promote one of his products. Recently on Facebook, my friend, nerd extraordinaire Esther Schindler, shared a photograph of herself wearing an old T-shirt and challenged her followers to identify it:Įither you have no idea what that image means, or you know exactly what it is.
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