Norton Desktop

Norton Desktop takes the Norton philosophy of practical system management and gives it a more graphical, desktop-like presentation. Designed for DOS, it provides an organized environment for launching applications, managing files, and navigating the computer without relying entirely on the command prompt. It arrived when PC users were increasingly expecting their machines to behave more like integrated workstations, yet DOS still lurked underneath everything. The result is an interesting halfway house between classic command-line computing and the graphical desktops that would soon become dominant. Norton Desktop is functional rather than flashy, but that restraint has its own charm. There is something amusing about looking at a program that was once considered a sophisticated desktop environment and realizing how little visual clutter it contains. Compared with modern operating systems, it is wonderfully direct: find the file, run the program, and get back to work.