Peter Norton Computing

~ the last words ~

The origin is one deleted file. Peter Norton was doing contract programming in Santa Monica in 1982, lost work to a DOS delete command, and did not want to retype it. He went and looked at what DOS actually did when you erased something, which was almost nothing: it overwrote the first character of the directory entry and marked the clusters free. The data was still sitting there. Put the character back before anything else claimed the space and the file came home.

He wrote UnErase, put it in a package called The Norton Utilities, and started the company with thirty thousand dollars and an IBM PC. Revenue was a million by 1984 and five million by 1986. Norton Guides came in 1985 as a pop-up reference you could summon over whatever you were doing, and Norton Commander in 1986 gave DOS two file panels and a keyboard you never had to leave. None of these were applications in the sense of things you worked in. They were repairs for a system that broke constantly and told you nothing when it did.

Symantec announced the purchase in May 1990 and closed it that August. Seventy million dollars in stock, roughly a third of Symantec, plus a board seat, for a company of 115 people. It was the biggest thing Symantec had done and it worked better than anything else it did: by 1992 the division carrying Norton's name was producing three quarters of the parent company's revenue. The entity called Peter Norton Computing stopped existing at that point. The word Norton has been on shipping software continuously ever since, which is why almost nobody registers that the company died in 1990.

The company was two years older than me and it was gone by the time I was six. What reached Turkey was the afterlife of it, a Symantec product line with a man on the front, and for years I read that man as a logo rather than a person. Learning that Peter Norton was real, and that he had been out of the business since before I could read, came very late and slightly rearranged the shelf in my head.

~ the record ~

~ the man on the box ~

The photograph is the folded arms and the pink oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled, looking straight at the buyer. It ran on the cover of his programmer's guide in 1985 and then onto the software packaging, and it became a registered US trademark, which is a strange thing for a pose to be. Later Norton AntiVirus ads put him in the same posture wearing a surgical mask over his face.

Symantec kept using it for eleven years after the man himself had left. Eventually the picture shrank onto the spine of the box and then came off altogether around 2001. There is no equivalent now. Nobody's face is on an antivirus product, partly because nobody buys antivirus in a box, and partly because the whole premise of the thing was a promise from one identifiable person that he had looked at the problem himself.

~ what symantec bought ~

At the time of the sale the utilities market was worth about $410 million a year and Norton held roughly 34 percent of it. Symantec had been leaning toward the Macintosh and did not have a serious position on the PC side. It bought one outright, along with a brand name that customers already trusted with the scariest situations they encountered: a disk that would not boot, a partition table that had chewed through itself overnight.

Most of the 115 employees moved across and the unit was renamed the Peter Norton Computing Group. What Symantec had actually acquired was permission to keep saying a name, and it has been extracting value from that permission for thirty-six years, through Norton AntiVirus and everything stacked on top of it, past the corporate rename to NortonLifeLock and past that one too.

~ the long tail ~

Peter Norton took the money and went somewhere else entirely. He and his wife had set up a family foundation in 1989, and he built one of the largest contemporary art collections in the United States, then gave a lot of it away to MoMA and the Whitney. He has said plainly that he has nothing to do with the software and has not for decades.

It is a rare exit. A founder whose name is still being printed on products sold to hundreds of millions of people, who has no involvement, no opinion offered in public, and no apparent interest in reclaiming any of it. The company died in 1990 and the name kept working the room without him.

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