 |
 | |
| Industry | Software Development |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1980 in Central Point, Oregon |
| Founder | Michael Burmeister-Brown |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Fate | Acquired by Symantec |
| Headquarters | |
| Parent | Gen Digital  |
Central Point Software, Inc. (CP, CPS, Central Point) was a leading software utilities maker for the PC market, supplying utilities software for the DOS and Microsoft Windows markets. It also made Apple II copy programs. Through a series of mergers, the company was ultimately acquired by Symantec in 1994.
CPS was founded by Michael Burmeister-Brown (Mike Brown) [1] in 1980 in Central Point, Oregon, for which the company was named. Building on the success of its Copy II PC backup utility, it moved to Beaverton, Oregon. In 1993 CPS acquired the XTree Company. [2] It was itself acquired by Symantec in 1994, for around $60 million. [3]
The company's most important early product was a series of utilities which allowed exact duplicates to be made of copy-protected diskettes. The first version, Copy II Plus v1.0 (for the Apple II), was released in June 1981. [4] With the success of the IBM PC and compatibles, a version for that platform - Copy II PC (copy2pc) - was released in 1983. [5]
CPS also offered a hardware add-in expansion card, the Copy II PC Deluxe Board, which was bundled with its own software. The Copy II PC Deluxe Board was able to read, write and copy disks from Apple II and Macintosh computer systems as well. Copy II PC's main competitor was Quaid Software's CopyWrite, which did not have a hardware component.
CPS also released Option Board hardware with TransCopy software for duplicating copy-protected floppy diskettes. [6]
In 1985, CPS released PC Tools, an integrated graphical DOS shell and utilities package. PC Tools was an instant success and became Central Point's flagship product, and positioned the company as the major competitor to Peter Norton Computing and its Norton Utilities and Norton Commander. CPS later manufactured a Macintosh version called Mac Tools. CPS licensed the Mirror, Undelete, and Unformat components of PC Tools to Microsoft for inclusion in MS-DOS versions 5.x and 6.x as external DOS utilities. CPS File Manager was ahead of its time, with features such as view ZIP archives as directories and a file/picture viewer.
In 1993, CPS released PC Tools for Windows 2.0 which ran on Windows 3.1. After the Symantec acquisition the programmer group that created PCTW 2.0 created Norton Navigator for Windows 95 and Symantec unbundled the File Manager used in PCTW 2.0 and released it as PC-Tools File Manager 3.0 for Windows 3.1
The lateness of PCTW to the Windows market was a major factor in why CPS was acquired by Symantec.[ citation needed ] Windows Server at the time was not viewed as a credible alternative to Novell NetWare - the first version of Windows Server was released in 1993 - and the desktop and server software products market was completely centered on Novell NetWare. The subsequent stumble by Novell to maintain dominance in the server market came years later and had nothing to do with the acquisition. Instead, like many software vendors, CPS underestimated how rapidly users were going to shift to Windows from DOS.
CPS's other major desktop product was Central Point Anti-Virus (CPAV), whose main competitor was Norton AntiVirus. CPAV was a licensed version of Carmel Software's Turbo Anti-Virus; CPS, in turn, licensed CPAV to Microsoft to create Microsoft Antivirus for DOS (MSAV) and Windows (MWAV).
CPS also released CPAV for Netware 3.xx and 4.x Netware servers in 1993.
Central Point also sold the Apple II clone Laser 128 by mail. [7]
 |
Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare.
Gen Digital Inc. is a multinational software company co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. The company provides cybersecurity software and services. Gen is a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock-market index. The company also has development centers in Pune, Chennai and Bangalore. Its portfolio includes Norton, Avast, LifeLock, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner.
PartitionMagic is a utility software program for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by PowerQuest, but subsequently owned by Symantec. As of December 8, 2009, the Symantec website stated that they no longer offer PartitionMagic.
GHOST, now Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec.
ESET NOD32 Antivirus, commonly known as NOD32, is an antivirus software package made by the Slovak company ESET. ESET NOD32 Antivirus is sold in two editions, Home Edition and Business Edition. The Business Edition packages add ESET Remote Administrator allowing for server deployment and management, mirroring of threat signature database updates and the ability to install on Microsoft Windows Server operating systems.
Stac Electronics, originally incorporated as State of the Art Consulting and later shortened to Stac, Inc., was a technology company founded in 1983. It is known primarily for its Lempel–Ziv–Stac lossless compression algorithm and Stacker disk compression utility for compressing data for storage.
Norton AntiVirus is an anti-virus or anti-malware software product founded by Peter Norton, developed and distributed by Symantec since 1990 as part of its Norton family of computer security products. It uses signatures and heuristics to identify viruses. Other features included in it are e-mail spam filtering and phishing protection.
Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was a software company founded by Peter Norton. The first and best known software package it produced was Norton Utilities. Another successful software package was Norton Commander, especially the DOS version. The company in this form lasted from its founding in 1982 until 1990, when it was acquired by Symantec.
Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8 was released 26 October 2012.
Microsoft Anti-Virus (MSAV) is an antivirus program introduced by Microsoft for its MS-DOS operating system. The program first appeared in MS-DOS version 6.0 (1993) and last appeared in MS-DOS 6.22. The first version of the antivirus program was basic, had no inbuilt update facility and could scan for 1,234 different viruses. Microsoft Anti-Virus for Windows (MWAV), included as part of the package, was a front end that allowed MSAV to run properly on Windows 3.1x.
Mercury Mail Transport System is a standards-compliant mail server developed by David Harris, who also develops the Pegasus Mail client.
PC Tools is a collection of software utilities for DOS developed by Central Point Software.
Norton SystemWorks is a discontinued utility software suite by Symantec Corp. It integrates three of Symantec's most popular products – Norton Utilities, Norton CrashGuard and Norton AntiVirus – into one program designed to simplify solving common PC issues. Backup software was added later to high-end editions. SystemWorks was innovative in that it combined several applications into an all-in-one software for managing computer health, thus saving significant costs and time often spent on using different unrelated programs. SystemWorks, which was introduced in 1998 has since inspired a host of competitors such as iolo System Mechanic, McAfee Nuts And Bolts, Badosoft First Aid and many others.
Caldera OpenLinux (COL) is a defunct Linux distribution. Caldera originally introduced it in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.
Quest Development Corporation was a privately held software development company founded by serial entrepreneur Kevin Azzouz at a newly developed technology center in San Luis Obispo, California. Azzouz began developing a storage management and backup platform after his early purchase of a Rodime hard drive failed in 1983 resulting in the loss of important data.
PC Tools, formerly known as WinGuides.com, was a software company acquired by Symantec in 2008; the new owner eventually discontinued the PC Tools name. Company headquarters were in Australia, with offices in Luxembourg, the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and Ukraine. The company had previously developed and distributed security and optimization software for the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows platforms.
pcAnywhere is a discontinued suite of computer programs by Symantec which allows a user of the pcAnywhere remote program on a computer to connect to a personal computer running the pcAnywhere host if both are connected to interconnected networks and the password is known. pcAnywhere runs on several platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Pocket PC.
Fifth Generation Systems, Inc., was a computer security company founded October 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States by Robert Mitchell, Leroy Mitchell, Roger Ivey, and Bruce Ray. All four later left the company after it was acquired by Barry Bellue who was accused by the founders of fraud and continued theft from company accounts for illegal personal use. Fifth Generation's initial commercial product was FastBack, an early competitor to The Norton Backup from Symantec.
GroupWise is a messaging and collaboration platform from OpenText that supports email, calendaring, personal information management, instant messaging, and document management. The GroupWise platform consists of desktop client software, which is available for Windows,, and the server software, which is supported on Windows Server and Linux.
Norton, formerly known as Norton by Symantec, is a brand of Gen Digital co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. Norton originally provided utility software for DOS, and currently offers a variety of products and services related to digital security, identity protection, and online privacy and utilities.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
