The fallacy with crowd-driven development

[jaclaz]

I stand corrected.  Time flies.  That was 30 years ago - back when the keyboard I'm typing on was made, and engineering was Real Engineering.

You'll need to be corrected again , the "switch" between "exceptionally good software", in which I will include also the Norton Desktop (a replacement shell for Windows 3.x) and "senseless crappy bloat" came well after 1995 (i.e. roughly 20 years ago or less), please read as "with the advent of Windows 95 and later of Windows 98" and the progressive migration to NT based systems (and still the early Norton Utilities for Windows NT did have some usefulness and GHOST- the real thing, not the half @§§ed replacement after Ghost 2003 - still goes strong).

I would say that "Norton" products dominated the PC market for 20 years roughly from the 80's through the 90's up to the very early 2000's. 

 

jaclaz 

Edited January 3, 2015 by jaclaz

[NoelC]

I'm willing to stand corrected any number of times.    My high tech life is more like a blur than a series of well-defined moments.

 

I do remember basing the development environment of a whole engineering department on Norton Desktop.  To this day I occasionally use WinBatch, a derivative of the Norton Desktop scripting language (and not associated in any way I can see with Norton or Symantec).

 

-Noel

[jaclaz]

I do remember basing the development environment of a whole engineering department on Norton Desktop.  To this day I occasionally use WinBatch, a derivative of the Norton Desktop scripting language (and not associated in any way I can see with Norton or Symantec).

I will surprise you telling how I still have *somewhere* a printed (on a needle/dot matrix printer ) the whole manual of that Norton Desktop batch language, which was pretty good at the time, I remember writing in it a "GUI" wrap around to PKZIP/PKUNZIP.

 

jaclaz

[NoelC]

No surprise there.  You seem to be in touch with reality and have been for some time.  The Ability To Recognize Something Good is a very handy personality trait, though largely under developed in modern times in many of the younger folks.  I blame smart phones and tablets for that.

 

Among other things, we had written with it at the time a wrapper to PVCS that extended Explorer and worked VERY much the way Tortoise SVN works today.  We had surprisingly productive engineers on Windows for Workgroups.

 

-Noel

[jaclaz]

I tend to call that "common sense" :

 

 

, but yes, it is not-so-common.

 

jaclaz

[JorgeA]

 

Nice screenshot. Is that on Windows 2 or thereabouts? IIRC even the Win3.x scrollbars were fancier.

 

That said, the scrollbar looks like what Microsoft is using nowadays for Internet Explorer...

 

--JorgeA

You must be joking.

That is good ol' DOS!

 

And of course the Norton Utilities (while nice and a very useful tool) were not your "everyday" program, what you had before you most of the time was the Norton Commander

 

 

You know, my first reaction was to say the screenshot was DOS as it reminded me of WordStar  , but then I saw the estimated time frame and thought that 18-20 years wasn't back far enough for DOS, as by 1994-96 Windows had largely taken over the PC universe. And then I noticed the scrollbar and thought that it looked too fancy for DOS anyway, but there you go...

 

--JorgeA