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\n\tAs you may remember, in 1990, Peter Norton sold his company and its award winning DOS-based products to Symantec. In 1994, after a couple of years of continuing to produce the DOS-based tools, Symantec took the Norton Utilities into realm of Windows with the Norton Utilities 8.0 for Windows/DOS. While the majority of the tools in version 8 were still DOS-based tools, a handful of them were designed to run in Windows. These included several new tools as well several standard tools that were converted from DOS to Windows. The latter included Norton Disk Doctor, the crown jewel of the utilities, and Speed Disk, the amazing disk defragmenter. The former included System Watch, a utility for monitoring system resources and a set of utilities for working with INI files—the Windows 3.x equivalent of the Registry.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tThe $179 software package came on 4 high density floppy disks.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tEven though version 8 had Windows utilities, the installation ran entirely from DOS. As you can see here, the first screen in the installation procedure was in black and white and prompted you to choose the display color.
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\n\tBack in those days, computer users were more reactive than proactive, so it was common that people wouldn’t buy the Norton Utilities until you already had a problem. The first screen in the installation warned about installing the Norton utilities on the disk with the problem and suggested running the utilities from the floppy disk.
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\n\tIf you selected the Custom Install, you caught a glimpse of the Windows Utilities in Install Groups panel.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tWhen installing this old software, I still get a kick out of the reminders to mail in the paper registration card.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tAt the time that Norton Utilities 8.0 for Windows/DOS came out, hard disk compression tools were at the height of popularity due to the limited size and cost of the hard disks. Version 8 provided support for the popular disk compression programs of the time: DoubleSpace, Stacker and SuperStor.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tAt the end of the installation procedure, you were prompted to create a Rescue Disk that you could use to boot and repair your hard disk in the event of a catastrophic failure.
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\n\tOnce the operation was complete, you were told to label and put the disk in a safe place as well as informed how to use it in the event of an emergency.
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\n\tThe matching label made it easy to identify the Rescue Disk.
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\n\tOnce the installation was complete and you fired up Windows, you found two new program groups: Norton Utilities-DOS Group and Norton Utilities-Windows Group. Launching anything from the DOS group first shelled out of Windows into DOS. Launching anything from the Windows Group stayed within the Windows environment.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tAt that time, seeing the Norton Disk Doctor running in Windows was really something to behold. In fact it was revolutionary, especially for long time Norton fans such as myself.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tThe coolest part of having the Norton Disk Doctor running in Windows was the animation. The hard disks would spin and as they did the Doctor would lean over the spinning disks and appear to be inspecting them. During the partition table and boot record check he pulled out stethoscope and listened. During the file system check he would randomly pull sheets of paper out of the disk and examine them. During the directory check he would pull out file folders look in them. Then, during the disk checking phase, he pulled out a magnifying glass and looked over the surface of the disk.
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\n\tAt the time, it was extremely entertaining and I remember running it over and over again so all my colleagues could see it in action.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tAt the end of the operation, the Doctor pulled out a clipboard, wrote some notes on it and then turned it toward you. As he did so, a dialog box popped up and showed you the contents of the clipboard.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tThe Options for the Windows version of the Norton Disk Doctor were extremely detailed. Here you can see that you could pick and choose which tests that you wanted the Norton Disk Doctor to perform.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tIf you had a slower PC, you could disable the animation to speed things up. If you had a very fast PC, you could enable background music. I recall that I had a MIDI file that played the William Tell Overture and it was hilarious to watch the Doctor animation working to that tune.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tSpeed Disk, the second of the main Windows utilities, was also extremely interesting to watch. As it worked, each block would change colors depending on what was being done to it. The Legend at the bottom helped you to keep track each step along the way.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tAs Speed Disk went to work defragmenting your hard disk, the first thing that it did was move each block to the end of the hard disk. It would then write them back at the beginning of the disk in contiguous, optimized order.
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\n\tWhen it was done, all of the blocks would be yellow.
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\n\tOne of the neatest features of Speed Disk was that you could click on any block, and in the Block Detail section, see all the files that were in that particular block.
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\n\tSpeed Disk also had a host of configuration options, such as choosing the Optimization Method.
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\n\tIn addition to Blocks, you could also choose Bars. While the Bars were OK, I stuck with the Blocks. I also liked having Speed Disk work to the William Tell Overture.
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\n\tAs you may know from firsthand experience, back in the Windows 3.x days, Windows crashes were inevitable. The System Watch tool allowed you to keep track of Windows Resources so that you unload programs when resources were becoming scarce. At the very least, you would have some idea of when the system was going to crash.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tIf you were a real fanatic, you could pull down the Sensor menu and add more monitors to the System Watch tool.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tSystem Watch also had a ton of configuration options, such as choosing colors for the various monitors.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tThe Windows version of File Compare was great tool as it provided you with graphical way to see the differences between two text files (for example, the differences between autoexec.bat and autoexec.bak). You could also search and edit the files from within File Compare.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tImproperly altered INI files were often the cause of incessant problems in the Windows 3.x days. The INI Tracker was designed to make it very easy to keep track of any changes that were made to Windows INI files by installation programs, thus making it a lot easier to locate bungled alterations.
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\n\tThere were a ton of INI files in Windows 3.x and the INI Tuner made easier to view and learn about all of the various settings.
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\n\tIf you needed more detailed information about a particular setting, the context sensitive INI Advisor was an extremely valuable Help system to have on hand.
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\n\tOf course, once you identified a problem or found a way to make an improvement to an INI file, you would need an editor. The INI Editor was tied in to the INI Tracker and INI Tuner and was much better tool for making changes than the native SysEdit tool.
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
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\n\tThe INI Advisor was also a stand-alone Help system which provided a vast amount of additional information on how INI files worked.
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\n\tDid you use Norton Utilities 8.0?
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\n\tImage created by Greg Shultz for TechRepublic.
My first computer was a Kaypro 16 \"luggable\" running MS-DOS 2.11 which I obtained while studying computer science in 1986. After two years, I discovered that I had a knack for writing documentation and shifted my focus over to technical writing.
