I'm friends with Peter. I don't think he'd mind me saying:

He didn't set out to build the empire that he did--he really wanted independence for one person (and it just turned out that what we built was so good that lots of people wanted it). He doesn't want to be in the limelight. So, as the article mentioned, he's chosen to focus on philanthropy and art and just watches our business from afar. He's a smart, great guy.

Peter Norton wrote some pretty tight assembly, I learned a lot about data structures and coding from prying apart the Norton Utilities one-by-one. Super stuff, last but not least because it brought a fairly powerful command line to DOS which was in dire need of some tools.

In the pre-internet era, I remember going to my local library and checking out the programmer's guide.. probably six times before I got my own copy for a christmas present later that year. When you couldn't just stack overflow your problem, books like that were gold. I'd probably have ended my early teenage obsession at 14 if I hadn't had access to it.

> He didn't set out to build the empire that he did -- he really wanted independence for one person (and it just turned out that what we built was so good that lots of people wanted it)

Regardless of his original motives, he must really be proud that a huge bunch of people would agree that in the MS DOS world and the world thereafter, he was a big hero who produced terrific utilities and terrific books...stuff that many people learning about computers were utterly fascinated by and could in turn use that knowledge to create their own cool stuff. Where would people have been with a creaky OS but without UnErase, Speed Disk, Disk Doctor, Disk Editor, Ghost and many others? :)

If you're in touch with him, do convey the wishes and regards from a whole community of hackers. :)

How come Norton Commander wasn't even mentioned? Brilliant, simple, very practical two-panel file manager with a shell prompt. I still use its GNU clone, Midnight Commander, up until today.

How about the Norton Editor? Anyone remember that? Great editor that was fast and had an absolutely tiny executable.

Yes! That blue and white thing. Amazing piece of software.

The knowledge passed on from Symantec employees I've heard was that they had to pay more with Norton's photo on the box than without him.

Agreed. At the time I was with Symantec it was bandied about that the cost of having him on the box was becoming a pain point. They had been trying to phase his image out for years.

Peter is a MAJOR supporter of the arts. Big time.

> With his first wife, Norton accumulated one of the largest modern contemporary art collections in the United States.[30] Many of the pieces are on loan all over the world at any given time, and many were on view at Symantec Corporation. The foundation and the Norton Family Office are located in Santa Monica. ARTnews magazine regularly lists Norton among the world's top 200 collectors.

We have some of his collection on loan at my company. It's way cool to have legit art to look at when taking laps around the office. Thanks Peter!

Often lost in the Peter Norton mystique was the efforts of Brad Kingsbury who wrote many of the utilities as Peter's first programmer.

Per the wikipedia [0] article he went to Reed college and then got into Buddhism, like another icon of that era.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norton

I remember buying Norton Utilities on a 5" "flippy" disk. It was like a vinyl record in that you flipped it over to access side 2. And Norton Editor was a godsend in the days of Edlin and Wordstar.

"Pink Shirt Book. Guide to IBM PCs. So called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy wears on the cover."

For me Norton associates with Norton Commander. Midnight Commander is still a great tool today.

Which of his books would you recommend if you were interested in detailed information on programming old IBM PC hardware?

Probably Peter Norton's Assembly Language Book for the IBMPC. Ray Duncan's Advanced MSDOS was another essential. If you want a bit more esoteric, The Undocumented PC by Frank Van Gilluwe.

I could name a few more but I probably shouldn't be admitting that I'm pulling these off my shelves :-)

Ah thank you! I currently have the MS-DOS Encyclopedia (not the first first edition https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/2004/06/14/do... which was apparently a little _too_ detailed) which is pretty informative. I'll track down your recommendations though.

Oh. Another one is Norton's Programmer's Guide to the IBMPC. Finally, one other book is Brown & Kyle's PC Interrupts.

I sold a shareware DOS file management program written in assembler (the file was about 30kb) for a number of years which is why I have all this obscure stuff :-)