Before Norton Antivirus, Symantec was an AI startup with no product
The company behind Norton Antivirus started in 1982 as an artificial intelligence venture staffed by Stanford language researchers. Two years later it had nothing to sell, so a smaller startup took it over. Salvation came from a database program, a sales drive called the Six Pack Program and, eventually, a utilities maker named Peter Norton.
Gary Hendrix founded Symantec with a National Science Foundation grant to work on natural language and database software. By 1984 it was obvious the system could not be moved from DEC minicomputers onto personal computers, and C&E Software, run by Gordon Eubanks, acquired the company while keeping the Symantec name. The combined team built Q&A, pairing file management and word processing with a plain-English query feature called the Intelligent Assistant, released in November 1985.
Sales started slowly. Executive Rod Turner hired a new ad agency and launched the Six Pack Program, sending every employee on the road six days a week to visit six dealers a day, train six salespeople per shop and stay with friends or at Motel 6. To win venture backing from Kleiner Perkins, the chairman and chief executive took no salary, vice presidents halved theirs and other staff took 15% cuts. A German version shipped three weeks after the American one, the first software to handle German natural language.
Turner also set up a separate publishing label, Turner Hall, named after himself and marketing director Dottie Hall to sound established, selling add-ons for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Symantec bought Breakthrough Software, maker of TimeLine, in 1987, reorganised into product groups with their own profit responsibility and went public on NASDAQ on 23 June 1989. In 1990 it acquired Peter Norton Computing, and Norton Antivirus followed in 1991; Norton products grew from roughly a fifth of revenue to about 82% by 1993.
Later reshaping came in waves. Symantec sold its Veritas division to the Carlyle Group in 2016, and Broadcom bought its enterprise security business for $10.7 billion in 2019, leaving the consumer arm as NortonLifeLock. After merging with Avast in September 2022 it became Gen Digital, headquartered in both Tempe, Arizona, and Prague, with brands including Norton, Avast, AVG and CCleaner.
Source: Gen Digital
