Central Point Software

~ the goodbye ~

The company took its name from Central Point, Oregon, the town Michael Burmeister-Brown was living in when he started it in 1980. It moved to Beaverton later and kept the name anyway, so a Portland-area software house spent its entire life named after somewhere it had left.

Copy II PC came in 1983. Copy protection at the time was physical: publishers wrote sectors that violated the disk format and put deliberate errors on specific tracks, so that a normal DOS copy produced a floppy that would not boot. Copy II PC read the disk the way the drive saw it rather than the way DOS did, and reproduced the damage along with the data. By August 1985 it handled about ninety percent of what was on the shelves.

PC Tools arrived in 1985 and became the thing the company was known for, a DOS shell with an undelete that actually worked, and it spent a decade as the alternative to Peter Norton's utilities. That fight has its own grave. Less remembered is what happened in 1993, when Microsoft licensed Central Point Anti-Virus and Central Point Backup and shipped them inside MS-DOS 6 under the names MSAV and MSBACKUP. Central Point had licensed the scanner itself from an Israeli company called Carmel, so by then the anti-virus in Microsoft's box was three companies deep.

I never bought a box with this company's name on it, and neither did most of the people who ran its software. DOS 6.22 stayed on machines in Turkey years after Microsoft had moved on, and the virus scanner sitting in that menu was Central Point's with the label swapped. A company can be dead a decade and still be the thing checking your floppy.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what copy ii pc did ~

The Deluxe Board was the part that took nerve. It was a card that sat between the floppy drive and the controller and copied raw signal, which meant it did not care what the publisher had done to the format. Central Point had sold ten thousand of them by 1985 at a rate of several thousand a month, in software stores, with the box on the shelf.

The company's public position was the archival backup: you paid for the software, you were entitled to a working copy of it. The industry's position was that a piracy tool was being sold at Egghead next to the things it defeated. The argument resolved itself without anyone winning it, because copy protection broke too many legitimate installs and the publishers gave it up before the decade was out.

~ sixty million in stock ~

On 4 April 1994 Symantec announced it would swap four million of its shares for all of privately held Central Point, a deal valued at about $60 million. It closed on 1 June. Symantec had already bought Peter Norton Computing in August 1990, so one company now owned both sides of the utilities rivalry, and the combination took roughly 34 percent of a market worth about $410 million a year.

~ the code kept running ~

The engineers kept their jobs and changed employers. The group went on to build Norton Navigator for Windows 95, which put Central Point's file-manager ideas out under the brand they had spent ten years competing against. The DOS PC Tools line got no further releases.

The name did not stay retired either. An unrelated Australian security company called PC Tools started up in 2003, Symantec bought that one too in 2008, and closed it in 2013.

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