Norton SystemWorks

~ the goodbye ~

Norton was on every windows machine i saw in Turkey around 2000, and almost nobody had chosen it. It came with the computer, or it came from whoever set the computer up, and then it sat in the corner of the taskbar announcing that it was working. If you were the one in the house who understood computers, you were the one who got called when the machine slowed down, and the first thing you found was always Norton, already installed, already unhappy about something.

SystemWorks 1.0 shipped in september 1998 and the idea behind it was administrative rather than technical. Symantec already sold Norton Utilities and Norton AntiVirus separately, along with CrashGuard and a drawer full of smaller tools. SystemWorks put them in one carton at one price behind one installer. There were two rehearsals for it: Norton NT Tools in march 1996 for Windows NT machines, and a bundle called Norton Protected Desktop Solution in july 1998. Both read like somebody in marketing working out that the suite was the product.

The retail box was a north american object. In Turkey the software arrived some other way, and the version number on the CD rarely matched anything you could have bought. That is part of why the suite was so effective as a brand. You did not need to know what Speed Disk did or what a registry error was. You needed the name that meant fix the computer, and Symantec had bought that name off Peter Norton in 1990 and spent the decade since making it mean exactly that.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was in the box ~

Version 1.0 came with a six month subscription to something called Norton Web Services and a Bonus Pack containing Visual Page and WinFax Basic Edition. A Professional Edition followed in december 1998 with Norton Ghost and Norton 2000 added, because the millennium bug was a product category for about eighteen months. Version 2.0 arrived in march 1999 and pulled in Norton CleanSweep. The 2000 edition landed that august and added Norton Secret Stuff, which is the kind of name a company gives a file encryption tool when it does not want to say encryption on the box.

By the 2001 edition the suite officially supported Windows Millennium alongside NT and 2000, which meant it had to be five different programs pretending to be one. Nothing was ever removed. Each year the list on the back of the carton got a line longer, and each year the answer to what SystemWorks was became a little less possible to say in a sentence.

~ one button checkup ~

The 2002 edition, sold from august 2001, added Windows XP support and introduced One Button Checkup. That feature is the most honest artifact the product ever produced. It ran everything without asking and reported back that it had done so. Nobody buying this software wanted a disk defragmenter. They wanted the feeling of having been responsible about the computer, and Symantec had correctly worked out that the feeling could be delivered by a button.

The 2004 edition, out in september 2003, was the first to require product activation. From the 2005 edition the Professional tier was renamed Premier, and in january 2006 a Basic Edition appeared that shipped without antivirus at all. By the 2007 release there were three tiers and the difference between them was a support matrix rather than an idea.

~ the weight ~

The thing that turned SystemWorks from a fix into a symptom was GoBack. It was not Symantec's invention. It came out of WildFile and reached Symantec by way of Roxio, which sold it outright in april 2003 for $13 million. GoBack recorded up to 8 GB of disk changes so you could roll the whole drive back to how it was on tuesday. To do that it had to sit underneath the filesystem and load before Windows did.

Which meant it could not be removed the way a program is removed. The support forums of that decade are full of people who uninstalled GoBack and found their machine still booting into a screen that belonged to it. That was the reputation SystemWorks acquired in its last years: a suite you installed to make the computer faster which measurably made it slower, and which fought you on the way out. The 2006 Premier release in particular is remembered by the people who ran it, and not fondly.

~ how it actually ended ~

The Mac edition went first. It managed three versions, the last of them 3.0.1 in july 2003, and was dropped in 2004 so Symantec could put everything into internet security for the Mac instead.

The Windows end was quieter and stranger. On 3 february 2009 Symantec announced that Norton Utilities was returning as a standalone product. It had spent six years existing only inside SystemWorks. What was left was version 12.0, dated 23 september 2009, the first Windows SystemWorks that did not contain Norton Utilities in any edition. The individual tools were all still there in the Basic tier, Disk Doctor and Speed Disk and the rest, running as they always had. Only the name had been lifted out and taken back to its own carton. There was never a shutdown announcement. Symantec simply stopped making the next one, and a suite whose entire argument was that it was everything in one place ended as the leftovers of itself.

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