These included Lotus Express, Norton Commander's MCI Mail utility, MailRoom from Sierra Solutions, Emma, and MCI's own MCI Mail Express and Express Lite.
Norton Commander (commonly shortened to "NC" by DOS users, due to its filename NC.exe) was a prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired in 1990 by the Symantec corporation).
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Developers create applications that duplicate and extend the interface that was introduced by PathMinder and John Socha's famous Norton Commander for DOS.
The menus were accessed by different keys (control in WordStar, Alt or F10 in Microsoft programs, "/" in Lotus 1-2-3, F9 in Norton Commander to name a few common ones).
A supplemental feature was that the block graphic characters of code page 437 remained unchanged (IBM's official Central-European code page 852 did not have this property, making programs like Norton Commander look funny with corners and joints of border lines broken by accented letters).
The first screensaver was allegedly written for the original IBM PC by John Socha, best known for creating the Norton Commander; he also coined the term screen saver.