Who remembers the DOS based Norton Utilities Suite of Tools?
I remember using this utility suite every single day in the late 1980's. It came on a set of 5.25" floppy discs. I did desktop support back in the day, often travelling 800km+ (500 miles) round trips in a day and Norton Utilities was a core part of my toolkit. We'd often leave 4am in the morning, travel 400km, do the work we needed to do and travel back to be home by 6pm or so. In those days a typewriter often still stood next to the computer.
In the suite was:
* Norton Disk Doctor – essential for finding and repairing bad sectors / unbootable hard drives which was a common thing back then. Sometimes the drive heads even stuck and you'd put the drive on its side and give it a bang to loosen the heads.
* Norton Commander – indispensable for copying, moving, editing files. Today Midnight Commander still gives the same look and feel.
* Disk Editor – did sector level editing. I remember using it but can't recall why. I know we could read the text content of damaged files even with it. I seem to recall we had to sometimes repair the file header of say a wordprocessor document or database file manually, so the program would recognise the file type to open it.
* UnErase – I remember having to use this after I carelessly ran a BAT file which was an uninstaller.
* FileFix – we used to try repair damaged files so that they could at least open.
* Speed Disk – used regularly to defragment the heavily fragmented file systems.
* DoubleSpace – this compressed files into a virtual drive file (like a Zip file) so that 20MB drive may give you 30MB storage.
* Norton AntiVirus
The machines were 640kb base RAM with a primitive extended RAM that not everything could even access.
And Peter Noton… well he is actually still around and now 74 years old and still active at a Board level on some companies.
