Norton Guides were a product family sold by

Peter Norton Computing Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was a software company founded by Peter Norton. The first and best known software package it produced was Norton Utilities. Another successful software package was Norton Commander, especially the DOS version. In 1990 ...

. The guides were written in 1985 by Warren Woodford for the

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

Assembly Language, C, BASIC, and

Forth Forth or FORTH may refer to: Arts and entertainment * ''forth'' magazine, an Internet magazine * ''Forth'' (album), by The Verve, 2008 * ''Forth'', a 2011 album by Proto-Kaw * Radio Forth, a group of independent local radio stations in Scotla ...

languages and made available to

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

users via a

terminate-and-stay-resident A terminate-and-stay-resident program (commonly TSR) is a computer program running under DOS that uses a system call to return control to DOS as though it has finished, but remains in computer memory so it can be reactivated later. This technique ...

(TSR) program that integrated with programming language editors on IBM PC type computers. Norton Guides appears to be one of the first

Online help Online help is topic-oriented, procedural or reference information delivered through computer software. It is a form of user assistance. The purpose of most online help is to assist in using a software application, web application or operating sys ...

systems and the first example of a commercial product where programming reference information was integrated into the software development environment. The format was later used by independent users to create simple hypertexts before this concept was more popular. Hypertext capabilities however were limited, links between entries were only possibly by "see also" references at the end of each entry. The concept of providing "information at your fingertips", as he called it, via a TSR program was a signature technology developed by Woodford in 1980 and used in other programs he created in that era including MathStar, WordFinder/SynonymFinder and a

TEMPEST Tempest is a synonym for a storm. '' The Tempest'' is a play by William Shakespeare. Tempest or The Tempest may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Films * ''The Tempest'' (1908 film), a British silent film * ''The Tempest'' (1911 film), a ...

WWMCCS The Worldwide Military Command and Control System, or WWMCCS , was a military command and control system implemented for the command and control of the United States military. It was created in the days following the Cuban Missile Crisis. WWMCCS ...

workstation developed for Systematics General Corporation. Warren's Guides, aka the Norton Guides, were the last application of this type written by Woodford. Norton Guides were compiled from ASCII source files with a tool called NGC. Morten Elling wrote an alternative guides compiler NGX in 1994 or earlier. A utility to view Norton Guides .ng files is found at http://www.davep.org/norton-guides/

Editions

* ''Norton on-line programmer's guides. An on-line reference library of programming data.'' Version 1.0. 4 5-1/4" floppy disks. System requirements: IBM PC or compatible computer; 128K RAM; DOS 2.0 or higher; one disk drive.

Links

* http://www.davep.org/norton-guides/ * http://x-hacker.org/ng/ Computer programming books Hypertext {{Compu-book-stub