Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit

» see drsolomon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Alan Solomon was running S&S International as a data recovery business when PC viruses started arriving in volume, and in 1988 he began writing the tools he needed to deal with them. The commercial product shipped in 1991 as Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, and by 1993 S&S was trading its whole antivirus line under the Dr Solomon's name, the year the product took the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement. That award is the marker of how unusual this was: a British software company with a world-class position in a category the Americans otherwise owned.

It had the reviews to match. Byte and InfoWorld covered it favorably through the early 1990s, Jerry Pournelle was recommending it in his column by 1992, and a 1997 InfoWorld comparative test put its detection rates at the top of the field. It ran on MS-DOS and early Windows, and also on Novell NetWare, SCO Unix, Sun Solaris and OS/2, which is the platform list of a product sold into corporate server rooms rather than to home users.

On 9 June 1998 Network Associates, the company formed from McAfee and Network General and later renamed back to McAfee, announced it was buying Dr Solomon's Group plc for more than US$640 million in stock. The figure usually quoted is $642 million. The stated reason was European antivirus market share, which is an honest way of saying that Network Associates could not beat Dr Solomon's in Britain and Germany and had decided to buy it instead.

The product did not get an execution date. The detection engine was merged into McAfee VirusScan, the brand was wound down off the packaging over the following years, and there is no press release, support notice or final version number anywhere that marks the day Dr Solomon's stopped being a thing you could buy. That is how most software brands actually end. The acquisition is the only dated event, so the acquisition is the date on this stone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the toolkit shape ~

The name was accurate. This was a toolkit, distributed as a set of separate utilities rather than one application: an on-demand scanner you pointed at a drive, a memory-resident monitor that watched for activity, and boot floppies for cleaning a machine that was already infected and could not be trusted to run its own software.

That last piece is the one that dates it hardest. A boot-disk tool assumes the threat model of the early 1990s, where viruses lived in boot sectors and executable files and the correct response was to start the computer from known-clean media. Dr Solomon's added macro virus handling later, when Word documents became the delivery mechanism, and that change is the beginning of the end of the toolkit format. Once infection arrived through documents and then through email, the product people wanted was one resident thing that never stopped running.

~ six hundred and forty two million ~

The price is worth sitting with. In June 1998 a British antivirus company with roughly seven years of commercial sales was valued at $642 million in stock by an American acquirer, and that was considered a reasonable price for a defensive purchase in one region. Network Associates was assembling a security conglomerate at speed in this period and Dr Solomon's was the European leg of it.

S&S was based in Aylesbury, and after the sale the British antivirus industry it represented did not get rebuilt. Sophos survived independently for another two decades in the same country, and that is the whole of the list.

~ what happened to the engine ~

Engines outlive brands. The Dr Solomon's detection code went into VirusScan and shipped inside McAfee products long after the name was gone from any box, which means a large number of people who never heard of Alan Solomon were running his scanning work through the 2000s.

~ solomon himself ~

He stayed in the field after the sale, working through CARO and EICAR, the research and testing bodies that the antivirus industry built to stop itself lying about detection rates. For roughly thirty years he was one of the people the trade press called when a virus story needed somebody who had been there at the start of it. Virus Bulletin published its memoriam in February 2024.

I got my first modem in 1998, the same year this sale happened, and the antivirus name on machines around me in Turkey was Norton or McAfee. Dr Solomon's was a British and German enterprise product at its peak and it was being absorbed into the second of those two names in the exact months I started paying attention. The distance is a few hundred kilometers and about four years, which is enough.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »