Norton Desktop
More info
- Creator
- Symantec
- Released
- Type
- Shell replacement for Windows 3.x
- License
- Proprietary
Symantec's replacement for the Windows 3.x shell, with icons on the desktop, a trash can and drag and drop, four years before Windows 95 made all of that standard.
Windows 3.0 had a desktop with nothing on it: Program Manager was one window, File Manager another, and the surface beneath them was just a colour. Norton Desktop for Windows, which Symantec shipped in 1991, the year after buying Peter Norton Computing, put drive icons, printers and a trash can straight onto the desktop and let users drag files onto them. It replaced both Program Manager, with launch groups of its own, and File Manager, with its own two-pane view, and brought along tools from Norton Utilities: SmartErase, which could undo deletions, a shredder, the Sleeper screensaver, a viewer for foreign file formats, a calculator and a scheduler.
It was a shell that added what Microsoft had forgotten, and it sold accordingly; versions 2.0 and 3.0 followed in 1992 and 1993, with a DOS edition alongside. Then Windows 95 arrived with Explorer, desktop icons and a Recycle Bin in the box, and the market for shell replacements ended in a morning. Symantec tried once more with Norton Navigator for Windows 95 and then gave up.