When was symantec started

That went bust and so he started Symantec Corporation in got a grant from the National Science foundation to build natural language processing software; it turns out syntax and semantics make for a pretty good mashup. So the new company Symantec built out a database and some advanced natural language code, but by the PC revolution was on and that code had been built for a DEC PDP so could not be run on the emerging PCs in the industry.

The Symantec name stayed and Eubanks became the chairman of the board for the new company. People swapped rolls, and due to a sharp focus on sales they did well. During the early days of the PC, dealers - or small computer stores that were popping up all over the country, were critical to selling hardware and software. Every Symantec employee would go on the road for six days a week, visiting 6 dealers a day.

It was grueling but kept them growing and building. Lotus was in the midst of eating the lunch of previous tools. They added another devision and made SQZ a Lotus spreadsheet tool.

This is important, they were a 3 product company with divisions when in they got even more aggressive and purchased Breakthrough Software who made an early project management tool called TimeLine. And this is when they did something unique for a PC software company: they split each product into groups that leveraged a shared pool of resources. But there was a shared sales, finance, and operations team. This laid the framework for massive growth, increased sales, and took Symantec to their IPO in Things that, well, maybe should have been built into operating systems and mostly now are.

Norton could compress files, do file recovery, etc. The cash Symantec raised allowed them to acquire The Peter Norton Company in which would completely change the face of the company. This gave them development tools for PC and Mac as Norton had been building those.

This lead to the introduction of Symantec Antivirus for the Macintosh and called the anti-virus for PC Norton Antivirus because people already trusted that name. I remember this moment pretty poignantly. But the Norton tools were the gold standard. At least until they later got bloated. The high stock price supported Symantec's acquisitions, which were usually bought in exchange for Symantec stock.

Flat-file databases, in contrast to relational database programs, require all the data to be in a single file. Symantec made its biggest acquisition to date in August of when it purchased the highly successful Peter Norton Computing Inc. This software package historically has been the market leader in PC utilities software.

Utilities are programs that perform functions such as backing up and compressing files, checking for viruses, and restoring lost data.

The purchase also helped Symantec, whose utility products were more heavily weighted towards the Macintosh platform, expand into the PC utilities market. Most of Norton Computing's employees were retained.

The merger also helped Norton Computing regain the market share it was losing to competitors, especially Central Point Software. Norton Computing's revenues tripled between June of and September of , and by November it appeared to have regained the market lead over Central Point. Norton Computing's merger with Symantec has since been cited as one of the most successful acquisitions in the software industry.

Symantec made three more acquisitions in In August it acquired Zortech Inc. Even during the recession of the early s, which was especially severe in California, Symantec continued to grow.

Symantec also expanded in Europe. The company opened a European manufacturing facility outside of Dublin, Ireland, in October of The facility subsequently began supporting Symantec's customers outside of North America. In May, , Symantec began selling Norton Utilities and certain other software packages in the Soviet Union through three official distributors. To combat rampant software piracy in Russia, Symantec also offered after-sale services and technical support to registered users.

Taking a more active role in international distribution, Symantec acquired its exclusive distributor in the United Kingdom, Symantec U. By Symantec had a network of over partner companies worldwide and had produced over translated versions of various software products into different foreign languages.

The acquired companies were Whitewater Group of Evanston, Illinois, a developer of object-oriented programming tools and a provider of a collection of graphics libraries, and MultiScope Inc. In only 5 percent of Symantec's sales were in programming languages software, but Symantec hoped to expand its market by offering programming tools that could be used for multiple computer platforms.

In late Symantec officers were sued by rival software company Borland International Inc. This was the first legal case in which a high-level executive had been implicated based on electronic-mail messages as evidence, and thus the case attracted a great deal of attention even outside the software industry.

The next major product category that Symantec pursued was business project management software. In the early s this was seen as one of the fastest growing software areas. Symantec introduced Guide Line, an easy-to-use project scheduling software, and provided improved versions of Time Line, a leading project management software package. McAfee said it will fight Symantec's copy infringement case in court. In February , Cybermedia filed a lawsuit against Symantec for copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets.

Cybermedia vice president for marketing Bob Davis said, "In visual appearance, operation and design, Symantec's product is strikingly similar to an early version of UnInstaller, right down to some of the same computer bugs.

However, Symantec pointed out that the codes they used were licensed by Microsoft. Their agreement was not disclosed to the public. In , a class action lawsuit was filed against Symantec. The complainants claimed that Symantec illegally terminated their subscription time after purchasing the Norton computer security software product upgrade without providing credit or a refund.

They also alleged that the automatic cancellation of their subscription time was not disclosed in the company's policy. Uniloc claimed that the three companies used its patented "System for Software Registration," an anti-piracy product activation method and system with patent number 5,, [26]. Navigation menu Personal tools English Log in Request account. Namespaces Page Discussion. Views Read View source View history.