Where have you gone, Peter Norton? (2014)

Peter Norton was my hero way back in the late 80's to early 90's. I remember the first time I used Unerase to recover a deleted file and was fascinated by it. Then I discovered DiskEdit and began poking around in the FAT system and found out more about how DOS actually deletes a file. It actually marks the first character with a ?. Thus started my hacking days. Then I used DiskEdit to bypass copy protection hacking the byte…

I read Peter Norton's Inside the IBM PC (1986 edition) [1] a while back, out of an interest in computer history. It struck me as being quite a bit different than today's technical books. It had a very conversational writing style, and it seemed like it was aiming to accommodate computer hobbyists/enthusiasts who wanted to learn more about how their machine actually worked. There were probably a lot more such people back in the 80's than today. [1] https://archive.org/details/insideibmpc00nort

I'm friends with Peter. I don't think he'd mind me saying: He didn't set out to build the empire that he did--he really wanted independence for one person (and it just turned out that what we built was so good that lots of people wanted it). He doesn't want to be in the limelight. So, as the article mentioned, he's chosen to focus on philanthropy and art and just watches our business from afar. He's a smart, great guy.