PC-cillin

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

~ the last words ~

The antivirus shelf in an Ankara computer shop around 2001 had Norton and McAfee at eye level and everything else underneath. PC-cillin lived in the everything else, on a box with a name that read like a pun a pharmacist would make, and I never once bought it. I knew it from the comparison tables in the magazines, where it usually landed somewhere in the top five and was never the one anybody argued about.

Trend Micro started in Los Angeles in 1988 selling software copy protection, a business that stops working the moment the thing you are protecting against becomes more interesting than the thing you are selling. The founders ran into C-Brain, one of the first PC viruses to travel on floppies, and turned the company around. PC-cillin for MS-DOS arrived in 1990 as their first antivirus product, paid for by what the dongle business had already earned.

It sold, but not evenly. PC-cillin found its market in Asia first, and in Japan it became a bestseller under a different name entirely, Virus Buster, which is still what Trend Micro calls it there. The Western version kept the medicine joke and spent the nineties as a credible third option, the scanner you tried when Norton had slowed the machine to a crawl and McAfee had missed something.

That is the whole of my relationship with it. In Turkey the antivirus question in those years got answered by whatever came on a magazine cover CD or whatever your friend had a working serial for, and PC-cillin was rarely either. Kaspersky showed up later and took the enthusiast slot for good. PC-cillin stayed on the shelf, respected and unbought, which is a harder position to survive than being disliked.

~ the record ~

~ how the name went ~

The version list reads like a slow retreat. PC-cillin, then PC-cillin 2, then PC-cillin 95, then a straight run of PC-cillin 2000 through 2003. After that the product became PC-cillin Internet Security for versions 11 through 14, covering 2004 to 2006, at which point the original name was already a suffix rather than a title. Version 15 in 2007 went out in most markets as Trend Micro Internet Security with nothing else attached.

Australia and the United Kingdom held on for one more cycle and sold a 2008 line still badged PC-cillin, which is why the last boxes with the word on them are dated a year after the name was supposed to be gone. By the time Titanium branding arrived for versions 19 through 21, from 2011 to 2013, the medicine joke had been out of circulation for years. One more detail worth keeping: PC-cillin 2003 was the last standalone antivirus Trend Micro sold to consumers until 2007, because the company had decided everything should be a suite. Plenty of people did not want a suite.

~ what survived ~

Almost all of it, which makes this a strange grave. Trend Micro is still one of the largest security companies in the world, the scanning engine has descendants running in enterprise products, and Virus Buster is still on sale in Japan under the name it has carried since the beginning. Nothing about the product died. What died was a word.

Brands like this tend to go the same way. Somebody in marketing decides the name is unserious, that a pun about penicillin undersells an enterprise-grade engine, and the replacement is a description of the category rather than a name at all. Trend Micro Internet Security tells you what is in the box and nothing else. PC-cillin told you the company had a sense of humor in 1990, which is the part nobody can put back.

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