At the bottom of the screen, Norton Commander displays a list of commands that are extended on demand by the CTRL and ALT keys. Each panel can be easily configured to show information about the other panel, a directory tree, or a number of other options. After starting the program the user sees two panels with file lists. Norton Commander was easy to use because it had a constant view of two file manipulation objects at once. John Socha started work on Norton Commander in 1984 at the time, he called it 'Visual DOS' or 'VDOS'.

It came in two variants, Norton Desktop for DOS and Norton Desktop for Windows.īackground Commander Norton mascot including his trademark cap and white gloves, used in NC 5.51 computer icons The last MS-DOS version of Norton Commander, 5.51, was released on July 1, 1998.Ī related product, Norton Desktop, a graphical shell for MS-DOS and Windows, succeeded Norton Commander. NC provides a text-based user interface for managing files on top of MS-DOS. Norton Commander ( NC) is a discontinued prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired in 1990 by the Symantec corporation).