The Norton Commander 3.0 DOS file manager — Unboxing / Box Contents, Installing
Hey there, I have Norton Commanderfor you — [♫ Video Game 'Win Music Theme' plays] uhm, version 3.
0 to be exact.
So take a look at this.
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this box.
Okay, my camera work is not that good, but — But look at this, it's beatiful! You know from the timeswhen software came in boxes! And those boxes hadcool stickers on them — — saying that it hasadditional software! Ah, well.
Those were the days.
So.
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this piece ofcomputer history is written and designedby John Socha in 1984 and he was working onthe software for about five years, but before that he wascontributing to the PC society with useful utilities like a .
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screensaver.
Or .
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a keyboard buffer extender and there was another onecalled 'whereis'.
Iit was a finder utility.
The first version of the file managerwas entirely in Assembly, but that was too time-consumingaccording to Socha, so he switched to a blend of Cand Assembly.
at that time most quote-unquote”real programmers” wouldn't touch C That's what he said.
[almost laughing]In.
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an.
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interview.
It was originally called VDOSor 'Visual DOS', because it meant to be a shell for DOS.
But of course after joiningPeter Norton's company .
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It became The Norton Commander Now, let's take a look at the box! Oh yeah, it's a special message to thepurchasers of the Norton Commander 3.
0 Well, you can pause the video and read this thing.
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It's hillarious, in 2015.
Oh, a lot of phone numbers.
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Yeah, I guessit predates email.
Order direct from Peter Norton! Yeah .
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give us your credit card numberand expiration date, and everything and send it backin a simple envelope.
That's cool.
Oh yeah.
The license agreement.
You can pause the videoand read this as well.
I'm not going to open this.
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yet.
oh look at this.
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it's so.
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mmmhh.
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soft.
And there's.
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there is a book! A manual.
Look at this you don't really get these things nowadays with software.
uhm — software.
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you know .
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It's.
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it's not even comingin boxes anymore.
So.
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Cool picture.
very.
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uhm.
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monochome — ish.
And of course a photo.
And we have thedisks here! 3.
5″ and 5.
25″ disks They're so cool.
Y'know they calledFLOPPY disks.
Let's install Norton Commander! [♫ Computer beeps for 'error'] I wanted to use my 486 for this, but the real-time clockbattery went bad so, stupid Micronics motherboard BIOSit can't even boot.
Because every time i turn it on, or try to, you know, boot the thing.
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it doesn't do anything just resetsto the default BIOS settings and tells me to take a look at thereal-time clock battery.
And I'm way too lazy for that.
So I'm just gonna use a virtual machine.
Oh there's another thing! The 3.
5″ disk.
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it's not working.
I evenbought this USB floppy drive .
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cause I though my originaldrive went bad.
Well, no.
So I'm gonna stickto the 5.
25″ disks.
It gonna take so much time, but at least you can listen to drive.
It sounds .
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COOL.
[♫ Floppy Disk Drive seeking noise] After inserting the disk you onlyneed to type in .
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'install'.
And then it will bring up the installerfor The Norton Commander.
You hit a bunch of okays.
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select the drive, FROM where you want to install the software .
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and then specify the path .
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WHERE you want TO install the software.
And while it is copying filesI can tell you that there were a lot of versions ofThe Norton Commander.
Version 3.
0 brought ina lot of new features.
There was uh.
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I think the last version was 5.
0 for DOS.
And then they restartedthe version numbering.
There was even a version for Windows NT.
And this product line calledthe Norton Commander for Windows.
As you can see.
after restarting the computeryou only need to type in 'nc' and it will open up Norton Commander for you and you can select files and de-select them and what not.
Now, one of the cool features that it brought in was directory tree.
So let me create somedirectories here quickly.
And this is was not new back in DOS days.
There was a softwarecalled 'X tree' that had the same directory structure for navigating but it's cool that The Norton Commanderbrought in this feature.
So as you can see there's our directory tree and we can navigate.
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from directories to another directory It didn't display files.
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So as you can see I'mcreating a file here 'whatever' ah – it's not gonna work.
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it created ok.
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as you can see there's no file.
But it had a Quick Viewer and, well I only have text files here but it was able to open up Lotus 1-2-3 and spreadsheets, and a bunch of other formats.
It was really cool because you didn't have to open up anything to view the contents of a file.
I think that's pretty convenient.
Now, there's an other thing:it supported EGA mode but it looks ugly soI'm gonna switch back.
and if you didn't have a color display.
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it supported black and white as well.
Now, if you happened to have a laptop with a crappy display These white .
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'selection of files' it just didn't make any sense.
So if you select Laptop Screen Colors then you will have little rectangles next to the selected files.
Crappy displays for the win.
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Remember what I told you about screensavers? Take a look at this.
It's beautiful.
It's the built-in screen saver for the Norton Commander version 3.
0, the black sky with blue stars.
Man, I could watch this for hours but I don't have time for that! The Commander Mail or MCI mail — it was something to send and receive faxes.
I'm not sure if it supported faxes in this version but in later versions it did.
Wow, okay.
Clear text passwords.
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that's funny.
Whatever.
MCI ID.
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? I never used this to be honest.
But that's pretty straightforward so.
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You can select modems and everything.
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— oh yeah, please create those directories for me so I can delete them later — It even had an address book.
And I guess it did support fax.
Fax thingy.
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No notes.
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Okay, well.
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it doesn't really matter.
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And I think it was intelligent enough, yeah.
It was really cool back then to have this thing.
That's 1989, so you know.
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GUIs were not reallyon back then.
It's always funny to read the Last Minue Notes! And, well.
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it's not that funny actually.
But there were clones.
And the one that I'm going totalk about is Volkov Commander.
It actually copied Norton in every way.
Of course it had some cool features like.
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these opening-of-the-panelanimations but it lacked a lot of features like built-in editors, it used the MS DOS Edit.
And it was just you know, a clone.
But it was totally okay for someone who just wanted to browse files and then hit enter to execute them.
So that was it.
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about The Norton Commanderversion 3.
0.
Thank you for watching the video.
I'm planning on doing another one — a better one with Windows 3.
0 I have that in a box as well, and a bunch of other software and even a cool retro computer from a country that you might never even heard about Stay tuned and again, thank you for watching.
Have a nice day, bye.
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