I grew up with a Mac version of Norton Utilities. Did the PC version also have ''Fast Find'' with the little marathon guy running as it searched for files? I always liked watching that. :)
I'd imagine part of the reason for "oops we made a visual basic" is that they developed something close to it for their own development and prototyping purposes, so then they figured that packaging it up as a consumer application would be a pretty huge value add for the product, for relatively little effort.
Much like task manager. Dave Plumber wrote it while WinNT was in development so that he could see what was going on resource and process wise - check for memory leaks and the like. Turns out, the entire NT dev team liked it so much, he donated the code to the WinNT and 95 projects.
@@chrstfer2452 very unlikely. it wasn't a better environment over using bare C, and would be a lot slower. At least visual basic was very easy to pick up.
About the "unanchored" feeling of Windows 3.1: As a child user of 3.1 I never felt this, because we always had Program Manager maximized, since the background was completely useless. Program Manager IS Windows 3.1 as far as I'm concerned. "The desktop" is the collection of top-level folders. The only use for the colour/image background is the few seconds before Program Manager loads when you start Windows.
Exactly this. We came from the past, not the future when we used it, it was shiny and futuristic from our direction. Going back to it now? Of course we'll all see those flaws and limitations now, but it was liberating and each upgrade was almost magical when coming from years of dos prompt or vt100 terminals. As for the branding, no excuse for the large blue text, but I see the benefit of reminding people that "this is the bit you paid extra for".
My first PC at home ran Windows 3.0. My point of comparison was the also-new MS-DOS prompt, the Commodore 64 (which powered up to a BASIC interpreter, and also ran the somewhat anemic GEOS if you waited long enough..), and a TRS-80 Model III which tersely prompted you for things like "CASS?" to load something from an audio tape. So, no, Windows 3.x didn't seem sparse or barren or untethered. It seemed new, and full of possibilities. I didn't run ProgMan maximized, because I ran my foreground application maximized. I liked that I could minimize it (where the icon would appear on the desktop) and see both my program groups and the other running applications' icons, and switch between them easily. ALT+TAB, of course, worked as well, but only for stuff already open. Back then, you had maybe three things running. It wasn't like today, where I have 50 tabs of I-don't-even-remember-what open, and haven't rebooted my computer since the last season, and don't want to because it would take forever to get everything back to where it was.
Same here, i always had the program mananger maximized, and yes the desktop background image was basicly useless eye candy. For task switching i used the alt-tab combo.
We rarely used Windows, unless we wanted to play with an application which required it. We used Norton Commander on top of plain DOS cause that's where our gaming and work was. Windows was sluggish and unstable on 4MB machines.
I wish I knew this had existed as a kid in 1993. This turns Windows 3.1 from "that thing you launch Solitaire and Microsoft Office with" to an actual user interface you could use, rather than having to dip down to DOS for anything even remotely power-user-ish.
A absolutely love that you made the background look like an old install wizard background with that dithered blue gradient and chunky italic text in the corner
I think this is the most enraptured ive ever been by a "green screen lecture" video. The script is tight and entertaining, your delivery is top-notch, your graphics are eye-catching and relate perfectly to what you're talking about. Amazing work.
Is it strange that I actually found a use for the compress and email option at work the other day? It is nice to be able to attach a folder to an email without needing to open a new email, compress the folder to a zip, then drag the zip to the Outlook window to attach it.
The use case for this feature was in work environments with tight limitations on email size. When your Exchange email server will only accept attachments of 2MB, you zip up *everything* you need to send to other people. Got an invoice Word document you need to mail to a customer? Zip it and mail it. It became second nature to do this if your work environment needed it.
@@verficationaccount So how did you make the file associations? Notably, this isn't done during installation of 7zip, unlike most other applications of this type. One has to open up the program, go into options, and set the file associations there.
Dude, top notch quality. Everything, Research, Structure, Editing, Jokes, Eastereggs. And wow that old Installer background was just calming and beatifull in this size and Resolution :D
@@georgemaragos2378oh God, that video was funny. I didn't care much for John McAfee as a person but I'd be lying if I said he wasn't funny from time to time.
It seems to be mostly open source cross platform applications that don't use it. Which makes sense. They're often in a cross platform windowing system like GTK+ or Qt. They just have the same file dialog on Windows, Mac, and Linux as a result.
I use MS Office 2000 under Windows 10, and those programs don't seem to use the common dialogue, their boxes look exactly the same as when I ran Office 2k on Windows 98.
Office has a looooong tradition of thoroughly breaking Windows UI design rules. Microsoft would go to lengths to create style guidelines and inform developers of how to use common controls, and then release Office and... I mean, sure, why _not_ have a big glowing round icon in the top left of the window chrome, that, when clicked, revealed a menu? Sometimes Office would serve as a preview of UI elements to come. Like a public test-bed for ideas. But not all of them. Thankfully. Exhibit A is Word 6.0, which, IIRC, introduced the world to comctl3d.dll. You would load this library, pass it your window handle, and it would redraw the plain 2D solid color borders with a gray 3D bevel, kind of similar to Win95. Completely new look, completely ignored Windows' appearance settings, and got picked up by developers and completely took over. Like "blue LEDs" level of crazy. When Office 95 came out, it released alongside Win95 and was maybe the first and only time the Office suite and OS design languages really seemed to come from the same place. Then Office 97 showed up and sort of informed some of the Win98 style (more dynamic elements that responded to mouse-over events), but was still not quite aligned with either the current 95 or later 98 styles. Office 2000 was actually pretty close, aside from different dialogs. As was Office XP. That lasted about one whole year. And then... Office 2003 turned everything a weird sickly blue, and looked totally unlike anything else on your computer at the time, until it also spawned a blue wave of application makeovers. 2007 just touched the hue up a little, and absolutely nothing else. ..... Just kidding. '07 also crapped out the Ribbon -- the pathologically disorganized screen-eating junk drawer that is summoned from the bowels of UI hell when a menu bar and a tool bar get drunk and irresponsible. 2010 was sort of a weak attempt at doing Aero. 2013 was an experiment in snowblindness. 2016 finally course-corrected the color scheme, so basically Office 2010 Service Pack 2. For extra fun, try Office 2016 on the Mac! All the expense, none of the features, and of course you would prefer this one app use Windows key bindings instead of literally everything else running on a Macintosh, right? None of these (since 5/6/95, and to an extent, 2K/XP) really behaved the way Microsoft told developers that Windows applications should behave. I have to assume Windows developers and Office developers have never met in person.
@@moconnell663 They redid the dialog boxes in Vista, and because of how fundamentally different they are, they're called from a different API function.
This brought back a lot of memories of going over to friend's houses to use the computer and getting totally lost. I had only really used the Apple IIgs (with it's Mac-like OS) and Macs at home. Windows 3 totally confused me and your explanation of why really brought it all back. The mosh pits that formed at Computer City to buy Win 95 when it came out were almost justified because Windows 3 was so bad.
@@TassieLorenzo Because you needed the SDK and a Sun-SparcStation at that time to develop software for GeoWorks. And this was just too expensive. On the other side, Microsoft sold "QuickC for Windows" for about 70 US Dollar. That's all you needed to develop Software for Windows 3.x. Of course, there was also Microsoft C for about 600 US Dollar for the professional developers if you needed more, but QuickC was for the most users enough.
21:25 - For the methodology, they most-likely did subclassing (hWnd hooks) into to override the dialog. This is a similar approach to how we overrode the UserName, Password text boxes & Login button with our own user controls for AOL 2.0 - 2.5 back in the day. Of course 3.0, make things a bit more ticky against this.
This is fantastic, one of my main interests is when people add features from more recent games to old Pokémon games and that’s exactly what this feels like: a romhack of windows 3.0. I’m absolutely stunned this was contemporary with the OS, it’s like someone showed up with a time machine and an emulator and said “hey I got some ideas”
I loved this program. Many of the noted negative aspects are lessons learned for the first time by their trailblazing. not all the innovation this software brought ended up being the direct hindsight shows successful, but they certainly were interesting experiments and new ground. thanks for bring me back to those days.
It's important to remember that many people didn't use Windows 3.X as a full-time "desktop environment". People would start Windows from the DOS command line, run a specific GUI application (e.g. Microsoft Word), and then exit Windows when they were done with that app. People would do this repeatedly over the course of a day. Also remember that there were relatively few Windows applications worth using, and most people still used DOS programs for a lot of their work. NDW was awesome -- I was a beta tester for it, and used every version. It made using Windows 3.X a lot less painful, but I still frequently exited back to DOS. P.S. I'm pretty sure that Norton licensed the scripting tools (the "VB clone") from another company. I don't think they were created in-house. P.P.S. "SmartCan" (AKA "Erase Protect") was a mess. It took memory away from applications, slowed down the system, and wasn't entirely reliable. It also created security problems on networks because it couldn't move the permissions when it moved a "deleted" file to it's hidden directory. This meant anybody could recover any deleted file, even if they wouldn't have had permissions to access the original.
I love this kind of UI review. Even with all the nostalgia videos and websites out there, it's not that common to demonstrate what it was like to interact with those interfaces and the limitations/peculiarities they had (and how you could overcome them).
Really like how you get creative with the green screen! Keep up the great work, really enjoyed the video and I learnt about norton desktop which I never knew existed!
Wow. Completely forgot that I used to use Norton Desktop. It worked very well. Also really liked GeoWorks. It not only brought a window GUI to machines that didn't have specs necessary for Windows 3.1, but also had several apps that were superior the time. The desktop publisher and word processor completely outshone Office, and they were built in packages, not a separate paid suite.
I've never heard of Norton Desktop before this video. Funny how I don't have any specific memory of considering using Windows 3.1 hard or troublesome in any way. I was 10 yo in 1993 and went from MS DOS 6.22 to Windows 3.1 and all I can recall is "I love it". That's a great video. Congratulations!
It's amazing how they managed to integrate so much into Windows in a seamless way. What is even more amazing is they put in things we take for granted now long before Windows did this themself. Very impressive piece of software that I had never heard of.
I remember the improvements Norton also brought to DOS. The file descriptions mentioned in the video were also available in DOS and they provided their own version of “dir” showing them. A bit like Windows 95 long file names before their time. They also brought tons of utilities for batch files, like colours, dialogue boxes, etc. It was pretty neat for its day.
File descriptions started as a feature of 4DOS, which was a replacement for COMMAND.COM. Norton licensed 4DOS and bundled it with Norton Utilities, calling it NDOS. NDW picked it up from there. P.S. For people wondering why you would want/need file descriptions, remember that filenames were limited to 8 upper case characters in DOS.
Wow this video is 2 years old already, RU-vid just recommended it to me. Must say your Videos are always long, so I have to have the time to sit through them, but you present such good facts about the product that I also don't see you skimming over anything easily. Well presented, I loved to see your review of old tech and software that I most of the cases just heard of back when I was young and did not really understand the purpose of. Hats off to you!
This is stirring up some long buried UI memories. Maybe I saw this as a very young child at some relative's house. Maybe I'm confusing it with OS/2, which I know for sure we had. Either way, it's giving me a weird sense of deja vu.
I remember spending a lot of time playing around with the icon editor as a teen. My sister, too. There was something just fun about drawing in such a small space. Don't think the icon sets we made survived, though. Can't even remember what the file extension was.
Given the complexity of the system integration, I'm sure the Windows team had copies just to check what would break. Because back then Microsoft cared about quality and 3rd party developers (except Novell/Borland/Netscape/Stacker/DR).
The positive thing you can say about every new windows 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.11 release is each version added more built in / free programs that you sued to pay for. Starts as simple as Solitare and goes to networking, free internal email postoffice box WFWG, file compression, automated backups, program scheduler , modem program , networking, tcpip stack Many people forget that win 3 was basically the first real Dos > Windows jump, plus to increase the user base it was prudent to trim features so that it is not a totally new experience and also has to run on existing dos based machinery One reason say the NEXT system did not take of, yes it was a totally new software and state of the art but you also needed to run on the most modern and high specd expensive machine - you could not buy the OS ( which was itself expensive ) and try and install on a 2meg 286 This is why dos remained usable for such a long time, PC/AT computers were prices were very expensive and 1977 Apple II Price tag: $1,298 Inflation adjusted price: $5,389 1978 IBM 5110 Price tag: $9,875 Inflation adjusted price: $38,105 1982 Commodore 64 Price tag: $595 Inflation adjusted price: $1,551 1978 Camaro $10,800 Adjusted inflation guess $40,000 So with all these computers companies had just bought you could not really afford to scrap them and spend much more on new items, they were to expensive and you had to get some use out of them Today lets have a look at a new system today - depending on spec but a daily use pc for work could be say $500, even $800 or $1,000 , compare that to the Apple2, or the entry IBM PC 38k Todays cheap prices makes them throwaway item like a toaster
This brings back memories! My dad bought our first family computer (an Apple IIe if memory serves) in the early 80's. My university had a UNIX system with shared terminals in most of the buildings. I got my first 386 Windows PC from a friend in 1991 or 92. It ran Windows 3.11 and was of course very similar to what you showed. I'd forgot so much of what working with that was like! Thanks for an excellent video!
16:37 The image preview in Windows 95's Explorer was introduced with the optional Desktop Update that installed with Internet Explorer 4.0 as a download or on the free CD that was given away at every computer stores (the same way Windows XP SP2 update CD was distributed). It was sort of a free upgrade to Windows 95 (that got them in trouble with the Department of Justice), a preview of what would become standard in Windows 98.
Kinda weird, it was pretty much a free update. Or, in other words, the proof that Win98 was not really a new Windows version, just Win95 with extra stuff attached to it.
That's because the new Windows Explorer updated the file browser and web browser. They were mostly the same application. Also, why win98 supported gif animations and the desktop supported websites or html files as a background, the whole file UI and desktop was built around Explorer and web tech. Windows NT, 2000, XP and later split the explorer application into "Internet Explorer" and "File Explorer".
I stumbled across your channel and I thoroughly love all your content. I’m an amateur radio operator and everything you say is so precise and well said. You haven’t said one thing incorrectly and keep up the good work!!
Excellent video. When we had Windows 3.1 in our household, I remember we always had Program Manager full screen and never referred to the empty desktop behind it. I also remember only running Windows for school work and running XTREE Gold in DOS for file management and generally living in the DOS environment for games.
Norton desktop had some interesting features I remember, most of which were much like those adopted by "Chicago" Windows (95). I think we disabled most of them when using the computer for more RAM, most often Windows entirely to run games. Edit: The version I had included an option for a start menu equivalent and long file names.
Your videos are so incredibly well done and incredibly interesting. The Nintendo RF modulator hooked me in, and everything else has been just as compelling. I am so looking forward to an opportunity to watch more content like this. Keep it up!
I love seeing stuff like this, that didn't survive in people's minds like games. I remember seeing Norton Desktop on some piracy sources of that era, but never really thought about what it was.
As a power user back in the 80s and 90s, I agree with your interpretation of Norton Desktop, much of which became adopted into Windows eventually. PCTools, by Central Point Software, had many of the features, including the desktop, that Norton had, which I felt somewhat easier to use than Norton. Norton's extended memory manager was ultimately incorporated into Windows, however, I used QEMM instead, setting it up in autoexec. In those days, Windows had a hard time optimizing the extended memory environment. I am working of some retro projects presently, and will be using some of the old software.
I used Norton Desktop and then PCTools back in the day. PCTools also had virtual desktops with a preview panel and (iirc) the ability to select different wallpaper for each. I eventually got out of the habit of using virtual desktops (esp once I got set up with dual monitors), but they were a big deal for a good many years.
Probably my favorite Peter Norton product outside of Norton Commander (which lives on here on my PC as "Midnight Commander") is "Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBM PC". Besides doing an excellent job of teaching you assembler, it comes with a pretty sophisticated program that you build upon in each chapter called "dskpatch". And I still have my HP15C and HP16C right here on my desk. And yes, I still use them. :)
I’m like 90% sure they made a version for Windows 95 as part of a deluxe version of Norton Utilities because I remember much of this but on 95. I might even have a CD of it still.
I'm pretty sure I had it as well. I had Norton Utilities 5 or 6 for DOS and when I got Windows 95 I got Norton Desktop so that I'd have the graphical utilities. By the time I got to 98, I think I had stopped using it as my shell.
I remember that you could run it on Windows 95, kinda. Not everything worked properly and pretty much there was no need for it. Except some of the utilities might still have been useful.
Norton had products that gave drag and drop that predated windows. Its interface was a must for a dos based environment. Folder structures suddenly became useful. Undelete, move, hide. Backup. Xtree gold was another. It eventually had wisywig and free documents etc
I believe that the common dialog in Windows 3.x was provided by a DLL file, so maybe this software is either hijacking the DLL calls or replacing the DLL file outright. Common dialogs were used for opening/saving files, printing (choosing a printer, number of copies, etc.), and also picking colors. DLL files were also used for other shared resources, such as CARDS.DLL, which was used to generate the cards for Solitaire, Hearts, Freecell, and the various card games (Cruel, Dr Blackjack, Tut's Tomb, TriPeaks, etc.) that came with the MS Entertainment Packs. This is what lead to "DLL Hell", where different applications would install different versions of common DLL files, resulting in conflicts between them.
yes it did replace it! It backed up the OS DLL and restored it on uninstall! Imagine trying to do that on a modern OS. Those were the days when power users and hobbyists had much more influence than now.
This brings back memories. I had Norton desk on an IBM w/win3.1 my wife had ordered from an Avon book. 3.1 native sucked. I kept it until 98 upgrade. We have come a long way since then. Win 7 is still my all time.
As a user of both Windows and MacOS, I agree, and the additional utilities never quite integrate exactly how you'd want them to, and they're always made by small developers that abandon updates after a couple of years. Things that MacOS does have in it's favour for power users though, though, is the streamlined feel - whereas sometimes using the Windows 10 File Explorer feels like wading through feature-treacle. Also the spotlight search in Mac OS is by far the best (and fastest) quick launch system on the market, in my opinion.
Interestingly, program installers basically never stopped using the windows 3.0 approach to program groups. Its been awhile since I've used windows frequently, but lots of programs to this day will create an entry in the programs menu that has a link to itself, an uninstaller, and sometimes help. In Win95, MS wanted you to put the program in the programs menu directly, and use the built-in uninstaller and help utilities rather than having icons for them. Nobody did this.
As someone who was a huge fan of Norton Utiities and Desktop this was really awesome! Thank you for this. Quick edit: some people do use RPN to this day, and I love my HP calculator!
Great video. It reminded me of how odd Program Manager felt to me back then. Your thoughts about that were spot on. I also never knew about Norton Desktop for Windows. Seeing it here for the first time, it's mind blowing how much better it was than Microsoft's official OS- the features, the layout, everything. I would've loved using it instead back then.
Used Norton Desktop back in the day, mostly because it was a good compromise between Program Manager and strict file manager desktops like Gem. Also, it was generally faster than Windows itself, somehow. My favorite thing, tho, was that you could see the background image though the program manager. I would put a custom image, but overlay a screenshot of where I usually kept standard program groups, so if you moved that group, instead of the background image, you'd see the window, but with a message written on it admonishing you to put the window back.
This brought back the old memory of my dad proudly showing the young me how the new software that he just brought works and ask me how cool is that😂 ahhhh, the clicky mouse and the crt, it surely are the good old days
Norton desktop was fantastic. When I was in high school I got my first Tandy which came with Windows 3.1 and through a local computing group I found and installed Norton desktop. In fact when the original windows 95 came out I ended up going back to windows 3.1 and installed Norton desktop because it just ran better.
I think the reason trashcan undelete looks like that is because it also tries to recover files that were deleted while the deletion functions were not hooked, with
Thanks for the flashback. I stayed with my uncle over the summer of 1995. He ran his dental practice on a desktop that ran Norton Desktop. The Scripmaker did his stuff and he was proud of the Norton backup.
I used to use Norton Desktop before Windows 95 came out. A lot of the things you mention (the lack of permanence, no right click, zip integration) were completely alien concepts at the time in the PC world. After installing it, Norton Desktop was a permanent installation on my PC. What you’re seeing is the IT world figuring stuff out between themselves. User interface design wasn’t yet a thing. At the time we had no clue and just accepted whatever the program offered. We saw no problem with program manager trapping things within its MDI window, or opening a dos box to unzip a file. We were just happy to have more than 80x25 text mode 😆 Looking back it’s cool seeing ideas popping up and slowly being turned into a normal expectation.
Looks like a huge improvement over 3.1, strange how I've never seen it in action before. I can't help but wonder how well this would have run on period hardware though, I noticed you were running at 937 MHz, nearly twice as fast as my '98 machine.
937mhz, we had a 486DX33 with a whopping 4MB of RAM. People might say the good ole days of computing, for me I don't miss editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up enough memory under 640K to run programs.
Ah, DOS's memory limitations You could run DOS on a modern computer with its GBs of RAM and faster than a 90s supercomputer CPU, and lots of DOS programs/drivers would still treat it like a fast IBM XT as far as they cared. And that didn't really go away until Windows 95 - when most programmers started treating computers like fast 386s instead of fast 8088s.
The Power User comments struck very close to home. Way back I was pretty engaged in the community around a project called LiteStep. It was a total desktop replacement for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 3.5, NT 4, Windows 2000 and XP. It's appeal was that it was much lighter on resources than the default desktop, and quite ironically it didn't allow you to drag and drop things willy nilly on the desktop, something that was much lauded in this video. But on top of that it allowed for total customisation of just about everything regarding the desktop UI. The default theme had the start menu as a dropdown you got when right clicking anywhere on the desktop. This could be customized to only show the programs and options you selected or to copy the start menu, your choice. The font, colors and all that was also totally customizable. There was also support for all kinds of widgets that could be placed wherever you wanted. This was a power users dream, but it came at the cost of having to learn all about how to write advanced configuration files for every single thing you wanted it to do. Every function had to be configured separately and every widget had its own configuration options, often changing as the widget was updated. Yes everything had to be configured using text files. Every single thing had to be manually configured, and getting everything just the way you liked it could take a very long time as you added and removed widgets, changed fonts, wrote scripts for animations and so on. And if ever someone else needed to use your computer they very likely wouldn't get beyond moving the mouse around and clicking on a widget or two wondering just what was wrong with this computer. I had my custom theme with a custom font I'd created and everything installed on the computer at work and no one ever tried to use it a second time. It was great, but it was certainly not for the common user...
@@WhatALoadOfTosca A couple years. But remember that Xerox had tried to market what they made, and utterly failed, so they sold what they had to Apple. Some believe it was somehow stolen or ripped off, but history doesn't support that. Newsweek has an article on it that I can't link here (Google is your friend with the terms "apple bought xerox".) "But the idea of being the subject of Jobs's gaze didn't delight everyone at PARC. "We gave Jobs access in exchange for pre-IPO investment, " says Dr. Steve Hoover, the current CEO of PARC, which became an independent subsidiary of Xerox in 2002. "Apparently, not everyone knew that in the context of the visit, and that created some tension." PARC researchers had compiled several groundbreaking innovations into their Alto machine, such as a graphic user interface, bitmapping and "what you see is what you get" editing. When Jobs and a select group of Apple employees witnessed what PARC had wrought in a demo of the Alto at PARC labs in December 1979, Jobs was inspired."
"How long did it take to make it look like the old Mac OS?"... looks like countless other GUIs at the time.. IBMs OS2 Warp, GEM, RISC OS, Amiga workbench, X Window system just to name a few.. Mac OS only gets picked by those not realizing there were more choices back then than there are now..
12:40 people mock windows 3.x and I know it's not at all the topic of the video, but windows help was ahead of its time, in providing forward/Back navigation and hyperlinks. I really liked the help, though I was a kid when I was mucking around on windows 3.0
One of the things I absolutely love about Linux is you get all of the extreme customisation and control of power users, but by default none of it is generally enabled. Ubuntu for example aims for the 80% of normal users who just want to use it like a modern GUI system like Windows. But if you want you can absolutely control and change it in anyway you possibly want to, from changing every single setting for almost anything in the GUI, to recompiling your own changes. And even with stuff designed primarily for power users, it's still rare to put complex things in as the default. Instead for things that aim at the power users they're either configured minimally to normal users, or aren't configured at all (extreme example of Arch Linux).
Back when Windows 95 came out I was weirdly resistant to having a real desktop; I liked the idea of having a basic shell, and the screen just being a container for programs. It took me switching to macOS 10 before I started actually using the desktop as a desktop, and even then I preferred how all of the prior core functions had moved to the dock.
Really cool. Would love to see other shells for Windows 3.x. Central Point Desktop looks like a sleek shell for example. But Silver Wolf Desktop is something too look at. And Calmira is bonkers cool. It is still being sold!
about the UnDelete function, do you think maybe they were just trying to avoid getting into legal trouble with Apple? and the "toolbars at the bottom" well I think it's either a throwback to the good old `nc`, or, you know, a DOS developer got assigned to that project and had OPINIONS on how UIs should look like ps. I am very glad to find someone else appreciates that old school "blue gradient and drop shadow" installer a e s t h e t i c fantastic video, keep it up
"Toolbars at the bottom" have a long history, going back to mainframe and minicomputer terminals. "Toolbars at the top" are ubiquitous now, but weren't in the Windows 3.1 era.
this feels like that aliens game that used dual thumbsticks in like 1999 and everyone was like "what the hell, this control scheme is bad," like it was trying very hard to be a modern OS well ahead of its time and probably just scared people lmao. like this was back when you had to give people a VHS tape that told them how to use the "mouse" when they bought windows. I feel like zip integration in your file manager is just a *few* steps too many for the boomers buying computers in 1993 lmfao.
ALSO also, you could have pried zip integration in the file manager out of MY hands in 1993 too, but I was 8, almost 9, and I would have put up QUITE the fucking fight. I would have loved norton desktop.
zip integration in the file manager is still too much for many people today, as evident by how often people are utterly confused by it. (Maybe not even offering the convenience of seemingly seemlessly running/opening stuff from out of a zip archive directly, or at least hiding it away to be enabled first, would have actually been a good thing for many an inexperienced user. Put in an error message instructing the person that they have to extract it first...)
I remember watching Peter North in the '80's doing a lot on desktops... What? Who? Oh, Peter Norton... sorry don't know that guy... I'll see myself out. 🤭
I'm the guy that uses that "Compress and email" menu item - it saves me 10 seconds four or five times a day! I was an Amiga user for years before I first experienced Windows 3.1 and I always found it a bit odd that Windows itself wasn't really a thing you *used* and was instead just a thing that let you run other stuff - if you wanted to achieve *anything* it involved launching another program - but because GUIs were still the exception rather than the norm in the mainstream computing world I guess there was still some uncertainty about which way was the "right" way to do it, and the idea of an OS just being the thing that sits in the background while all the real work is done in applications was still the norm.
As a person who's first graphical OS was 3 I can tell you that what I often did was create a host of windows placed in a grid. There were extreme limitations on how many programs could be straight up installed on the thing, seeing as how it had 1.5 GB of hard drive space (a benchmark that will forever be with as 'the first hard drive I owned was one and a half gigs') realistically I could have every program installed have it's own little window to be ready for me when I opened up my computer. And, as I recall, it remembered what windows were opened so when the computer was turned back on (or you came back from DOS) things were like you had it before. I have definite nostalgia for it, though I'm certain it's not really something I'd want again.
This is really, profoundly impressive. I don't know what the hell kind of wizardry Norton pulled bu their sense of both technical excellence and vision for what users would want is stellar. It still ends up a little jank, but they shot for the moon and they damn well hit it.
I didn't know about the Norton Desktop, my parents had 95, then quickly upgraded to 98 after I was born. However, as soon as you booted it up, I got a wave of nostalgia and remembered they had that exact gui in my pre-k and k-4 computer class. I really really miss the 90s style. I was so homey. Like you said, it's like an old couch you make your own. I miss that. I still have a 98 boot disk, I even have my dad's old Packard Bell programs including a dos flight sim. I wanna build a 95/98 computer so i can play my old games and programs.
We used this at a job I worked in the early 90s. It was good, but I remember it struggling on PC I was using, it required slightly more ram and computers then had so little memory it's hard to comprehend now. That wasn't exclusive to this program, most new software then could sap your system. The first time I installed Win95 it barely functioned. Great video, I think people forget there were quite a few of these programs that were really good until 95 came out.
I don't really know how to describeThis so I'm sorry if it sounds confusing but I absolutely love the way that you describe not just the functionality of a program but also the way that it interacts with the people themselves and the way it makes them feel, and not only is it cool that you go into detail on that experience, but you also are very adept at actually verbally describing them. Again I really don't know how to specifically describe this or if there is a word for it but you're very good at it.
To comment on the multiple document interface: I think it made a lot of sense in the context of Windows 3. There was no true desktop and not yet a taskbar, so as you alluded to, apps like File Manager or Program Manager consisted of one large window, with smaller windows inside, and the large window is what got minimized to the desktop. If you look at other apps that used the interface, such as Word, there is some consistency there: one large Word window, and your actual documents were inside it. I'm not saying this was a good interface (I agree with you it wasn't much loved, even at the time), but it did have a somewhat macOS concept of "apps = documents = containers," that is, you associated the large windows with what you were doing (this one for typing, this one for finding files, etc.) The thing is, when the taskbar was introduced, this concept was immediately obsolete. Now you had a more document-centric approach, rather than an app-centric approach. But I remember even Office '97 still using the MDI, and completely ignoring the taskbar, which was not the right approach. (Ironically, the way Office '97 worked would somewhat resemble taskbar grouping that was introduced in XP, but it still didn't show you individual documents that were open).
Coming from AmigaOS, I realised that Windows 3 was a big step backwards, but I remember how much value Norton brought to Windows. Had also never heard of the Desktop offering, though. Then again, I also remember DR-DOS being streets ahead of MS-DOS too. Microsoft really was not the best available, yet somehow they ended up dominating, but it could not be because of innovative software ;-)
