you're right, I had wanted to highlight

The Mac version was especially good IMO

I grew up with a Mac version of Norton Utilities. Did the PC version also have ''Fast Find'' with the little marathon guy running as it searched for files? I always liked watching that. :)

I saw that using Utilities for 95 once. *chefs kiss*

The Mac version had the exact same animation, sometimes I used to run NDD just to watch it :)

Much like task manager. Dave Plumber wrote it while WinNT was in development so that he could see what was going on resource and process wise - check for memory leaks and the like. Turns out, the entire NT dev team liked it so much, he donated the code to the WinNT and 95 projects.

I would be surprised if a significant portion of the whole norton desktop software package werent written in the language

554⁴⁴⁴⁴ the 4⁴44

@@chrstfer2452 very unlikely. it wasn't a better environment over using bare C, and would be a lot slower. At least visual basic was very easy to pick up.

I like when companies make their dev tools publicly available. My favorite example is the track editor in F-Zero X Expansion Kit.

I did the same. Maximize!

Exactly this. We came from the past, not the future when we used it, it was shiny and futuristic from our direction. Going back to it now? Of course we'll all see those flaws and limitations now, but it was liberating and each upgrade was almost magical when coming from years of dos prompt or vt100 terminals. As for the branding, no excuse for the large blue text, but I see the benefit of reminding people that "this is the bit you paid extra for".

My first PC at home ran Windows 3.0. My point of comparison was the also-new MS-DOS prompt, the Commodore 64 (which powered up to a BASIC interpreter, and also ran the somewhat anemic GEOS if you waited long enough..), and a TRS-80 Model III which tersely prompted you for things like "CASS?" to load something from an audio tape. So, no, Windows 3.x didn't seem sparse or barren or untethered. It seemed new, and full of possibilities. I didn't run ProgMan maximized, because I ran my foreground application maximized. I liked that I could minimize it (where the icon would appear on the desktop) and see both my program groups and the other running applications' icons, and switch between them easily. ALT+TAB, of course, worked as well, but only for stuff already open. Back then, you had maybe three things running. It wasn't like today, where I have 50 tabs of I-don't-even-remember-what open, and haven't rebooted my computer since the last season, and don't want to because it would take forever to get everything back to where it was.

Same here, i always had the program mananger maximized, and yes the desktop background image was basicly useless eye candy. For task switching i used the alt-tab combo.

We rarely used Windows, unless we wanted to play with an application which required it. We used Norton Commander on top of plain DOS cause that's where our gaming and work was. Windows was sluggish and unstable on 4MB machines.

For real. I had Norton utilities for down, but didn't know it existed for win 3.1

Can confirm. I was 12 in 1993 and my Dad had Norton Desktop on his PC and it was incredible.

Find the parody video that the real mr mcafee done on uninstalling his system

RIP

​@@georgemaragos2378oh God, that video was funny. I didn't care much for John McAfee as a person but I'd be lying if I said he wasn't funny from time to time.

That look is most strongly associated with the Wise installer (and Win9x) for me.

He’s good. Also check Computer Clan with Ken.

Yeah i like how he makes uninteressting stuff very interesting

It seems to be mostly open source cross platform applications that don't use it. Which makes sense. They're often in a cross platform windowing system like GTK+ or Qt. They just have the same file dialog on Windows, Mac, and Linux as a result.

I use MS Office 2000 under Windows 10, and those programs don't seem to use the common dialogue, their boxes look exactly the same as when I ran Office 2k on Windows 98.

Or gosh darn office now... Why does it make me click twice to save. Bruh

Office has a looooong tradition of thoroughly breaking Windows UI design rules. Microsoft would go to lengths to create style guidelines and inform developers of how to use common controls, and then release Office and... I mean, sure, why _not_ have a big glowing round icon in the top left of the window chrome, that, when clicked, revealed a menu? Sometimes Office would serve as a preview of UI elements to come. Like a public test-bed for ideas. But not all of them. Thankfully. Exhibit A is Word 6.0, which, IIRC, introduced the world to comctl3d.dll. You would load this library, pass it your window handle, and it would redraw the plain 2D solid color borders with a gray 3D bevel, kind of similar to Win95. Completely new look, completely ignored Windows' appearance settings, and got picked up by developers and completely took over. Like "blue LEDs" level of crazy. When Office 95 came out, it released alongside Win95 and was maybe the first and only time the Office suite and OS design languages really seemed to come from the same place. Then Office 97 showed up and sort of informed some of the Win98 style (more dynamic elements that responded to mouse-over events), but was still not quite aligned with either the current 95 or later 98 styles. Office 2000 was actually pretty close, aside from different dialogs. As was Office XP. That lasted about one whole year. And then... Office 2003 turned everything a weird sickly blue, and looked totally unlike anything else on your computer at the time, until it also spawned a blue wave of application makeovers. 2007 just touched the hue up a little, and absolutely nothing else. ..... Just kidding. '07 also crapped out the Ribbon -- the pathologically disorganized screen-eating junk drawer that is summoned from the bowels of UI hell when a menu bar and a tool bar get drunk and irresponsible. 2010 was sort of a weak attempt at doing Aero. 2013 was an experiment in snowblindness. 2016 finally course-corrected the color scheme, so basically Office 2010 Service Pack 2. For extra fun, try Office 2016 on the Mac! All the expense, none of the features, and of course you would prefer this one app use Windows key bindings instead of literally everything else running on a Macintosh, right? None of these (since 5/6/95, and to an extent, 2K/XP) really behaved the way Microsoft told developers that Windows applications should behave. I have to assume Windows developers and Office developers have never met in person.

@@moconnell663 They redid the dialog boxes in Vista, and because of how fundamentally different they are, they're called from a different API function.

I didn´t even know I could do that. Never started the file manager as a program and looked at the options.

Yesss

Is it strange that I actually found a use for the compress and email option at work the other day? It is nice to be able to attach a folder to an email without needing to open a new email, compress the folder to a zip, then drag the zip to the Outlook window to attach it.

The use case for this feature was in work environments with tight limitations on email size. When your Exchange email server will only accept attachments of 2MB, you zip up *everything* you need to send to other people. Got an invoice Word document you need to mail to a customer? Zip it and mail it. It became second nature to do this if your work environment needed it.

@@verficationaccount So how did you make the file associations? Notably, this isn't done during installation of 7zip, unlike most other applications of this type. One has to open up the program, go into options, and set the file associations there.

that bayer matrix though

If I remember the Windows 16 API correctly, there were some hooks to customize especially Save and Open dialogs.

Yeah, subclassing dialog is still relevant - even you can see in current version of notepad's encoding selector!

Yeah! Once you see windows 3, and then once you realize how popular it was, you realize that people were STARVING for something better.

@@CathodeRayDude But then why did consumers overlook superior IBM-compatible alternatives like GeoWorks GUI operating system? :)

@@TassieLorenzo Because you needed the SDK and a Sun-SparcStation at that time to develop software for GeoWorks. And this was just too expensive. On the other side, Microsoft sold "QuickC for Windows" for about 70 US Dollar. That's all you needed to develop Software for Windows 3.x. Of course, there was also Microsoft C for about 600 US Dollar for the professional developers if you needed more, but QuickC was for the most users enough.

I'd hazard the wild guess that most home users were only ever running their pirated copy of Windows 3.1 to use their pirated copy of Word for Windows.

Esperanto flag :D

hey i used GEOS on my Commodore 64 back in the mid 80's... Man i'm getting old.

oh wow yeah I'd be very curious to hear a contemporary view!

If he read PC Magazine back in the day, he definitely knew.

Given the complexity of the system integration, I'm sure the Windows team had copies just to check what would break. Because back then Microsoft cared about quality and 3rd party developers (except Novell/Borland/Netscape/Stacker/DR).

@@johndododoe1411 they also cared a lot about breaking Windows on alternative DOSes, and presumably vice versa, but that's a whole different video!

The positive thing you can say about every new windows 3.0 / 3.1 / 3.11 release is each version added more built in / free programs that you sued to pay for. Starts as simple as Solitare and goes to networking, free internal email postoffice box WFWG, file compression, automated backups, program scheduler , modem program , networking, tcpip stack Many people forget that win 3 was basically the first real Dos > Windows jump, plus to increase the user base it was prudent to trim features so that it is not a totally new experience and also has to run on existing dos based machinery One reason say the NEXT system did not take of, yes it was a totally new software and state of the art but you also needed to run on the most modern and high specd expensive machine - you could not buy the OS ( which was itself expensive ) and try and install on a 2meg 286 This is why dos remained usable for such a long time, PC/AT computers were prices were very expensive and 1977 Apple II Price tag: $1,298 Inflation adjusted price: $5,389 1978 IBM 5110 Price tag: $9,875 Inflation adjusted price: $38,105 1982 Commodore 64 Price tag: $595 Inflation adjusted price: $1,551 1978 Camaro $10,800 Adjusted inflation guess $40,000 So with all these computers companies had just bought you could not really afford to scrap them and spend much more on new items, they were to expensive and you had to get some use out of them Today lets have a look at a new system today - depending on spec but a daily use pc for work could be say $500, even $800 or $1,000 , compare that to the Apple2, or the entry IBM PC 38k Todays cheap prices makes them throwaway item like a toaster

Theres calmira xp also, makes windows 3.1 look like xp it works surprisingly well

Calmira was great!

File descriptions started as a feature of 4DOS, which was a replacement for COMMAND.COM. Norton licensed 4DOS and bundled it with Norton Utilities, calling it NDOS. NDW picked it up from there. P.S. For people wondering why you would want/need file descriptions, remember that filenames were limited to 8 upper case characters in DOS.

Kinda weird, it was pretty much a free update. Or, in other words, the proof that Win98 was not really a new Windows version, just Win95 with extra stuff attached to it.

That's because the new Windows Explorer updated the file browser and web browser. They were mostly the same application. Also, why win98 supported gif animations and the desktop supported websites or html files as a background, the whole file UI and desktop was built around Explorer and web tech. Windows NT, 2000, XP and later split the explorer application into "Internet Explorer" and "File Explorer".

Thank you! I feel the same way, I didn't do a green screen video until I'd figured out how to make it fit my tastes.

I'm pretty sure I had it as well. I had Norton Utilities 5 or 6 for DOS and when I got Windows 95 I got Norton Desktop so that I'd have the graphical utilities. By the time I got to 98, I think I had stopped using it as my shell.

Yes I had it for both 3.1 and 95. The 95 version allowed for multiple desktops (or workspaces) which was an innovative feature at the time

I remember that you could run it on Windows 95, kinda. Not everything worked properly and pretty much there was no need for it. Except some of the utilities might still have been useful.

3-5 minutes!

How long did it take Apple to make the Mac look like Xerox PARC's os? ;)

@@WhatALoadOfTosca A couple years. But remember that Xerox had tried to market what they made, and utterly failed, so they sold what they had to Apple. Some believe it was somehow stolen or ripped off, but history doesn't support that. Newsweek has an article on it that I can't link here (Google is your friend with the terms "apple bought xerox".) "But the idea of being the subject of Jobs's gaze didn't delight everyone at PARC. "We gave Jobs access in exchange for pre-IPO investment, " says Dr. Steve Hoover, the current CEO of PARC, which became an independent subsidiary of Xerox in 2002. "Apparently, not everyone knew that in the context of the visit, and that created some tension." PARC researchers had compiled several groundbreaking innovations into their Alto machine, such as a graphic user interface, bitmapping and "what you see is what you get" editing. When Jobs and a select group of Apple employees witnessed what PARC had wrought in a demo of the Alto at PARC labs in December 1979, Jobs was inspired."

"How long did it take to make it look like the old Mac OS?"... looks like countless other GUIs at the time.. IBMs OS2 Warp, GEM, RISC OS, Amiga workbench, X Window system just to name a few.. Mac OS only gets picked by those not realizing there were more choices back then than there are now..

I think that was a separate program, you probably used it alongside and in your memory it blended together.

As a user of both Windows and MacOS, I agree, and the additional utilities never quite integrate exactly how you'd want them to, and they're always made by small developers that abandon updates after a couple of years. Things that MacOS does have in it's favour for power users though, though, is the streamlined feel - whereas sometimes using the Windows 10 File Explorer feels like wading through feature-treacle. Also the spotlight search in Mac OS is by far the best (and fastest) quick launch system on the market, in my opinion.

@@GeorgeBratley i hate the mouse feel on Mac OS, touchpad is better though.

thank you! it is a tremendous amount of effort

yeah I was thinking maybe it replaces them outright but that seems... barbarian? I should check.

@@CathodeRayDude I'm 99% sure that NDW just replaced COMDLG.DLL. Such hackery was relatively common back then.

yes it did replace it! It backed up the OS DLL and restored it on uninstall! Imagine trying to do that on a modern OS. Those were the days when power users and hobbyists had much more influence than now.

I used Norton Desktop and then PCTools back in the day. PCTools also had virtual desktops with a preview panel and (iirc) the ability to select different wallpaper for each. I eventually got out of the habit of using virtual desktops (esp once I got set up with dual monitors), but they were a big deal for a good many years.

Funny, you turned that one office prank into a useful feature.

937mhz, we had a 486DX33 with a whopping 4MB of RAM. People might say the good ole days of computing, for me I don't miss editing autoexec.bat and config.sys to free up enough memory under 640K to run programs.

Ah, DOS's memory limitations You could run DOS on a modern computer with its GBs of RAM and faster than a 90s supercomputer CPU, and lots of DOS programs/drivers would still treat it like a fast IBM XT as far as they cared. And that didn't really go away until Windows 95 - when most programmers started treating computers like fast 386s instead of fast 8088s.

I don't remember it being too bad. Everything ran pretty slowly anyway.

Can confirm that on slower machines this was less fun. Yes, everything was slow anyway, but with NDW it was a lot worse.

Ultrasound Red

After about 20 minutes I looked away and got a very interesting green persistence of vision version of Gravis in my vision.

all super valid points I hadn't considered!

"Toolbars at the bottom" have a long history, going back to mainframe and minicomputer terminals. "Toolbars at the top" are ubiquitous now, but weren't in the Windows 3.1 era.

And beds, sofas and bathtubs - or so I'm told 👀

also another absolute gem of a video, absolutely my new favorite channel ❤️💚❤️

ALSO also, you could have pried zip integration in the file manager out of MY hands in 1993 too, but I was 8, almost 9, and I would have put up QUITE the fucking fight. I would have loved norton desktop.

zip integration in the file manager is still too much for many people today, as evident by how often people are utterly confused by it. (Maybe not even offering the convenience of seemingly seemlessly running/opening stuff from out of a zip archive directly, or at least hiding it away to be enabled first, would have actually been a good thing for many an inexperienced user. Put in an error message instructing the person that they have to extract it first...)

If they collaborated it would be glorious