Symantec
More info
- Creator
- Gary Hendrix
- Released
- 1982–2019
- Type
- Security software
- Successor
- Enterprise arm to Broadcom, consumer arm became NortonLifeLock
The company behind Norton AntiVirus, the yellow box that came with every new PC and kept nagging you that your subscription had expired.
Symantec was founded in 1982 to build natural-language software, but turned into a utilities company when it bought Peter Norton Computing in 1990. Norton Utilities and soon Norton AntiVirus became the name people knew, with the Symantec logo in the small print. It grew by acquisition, including storage firm Veritas in 2005 – a merger that was unwound eleven years later.
Through the 2010s, signature-based antivirus lost ground to cloud-driven tools such as CrowdStrike Falcon. In 2019 Symantec was split: the enterprise business and the name itself went to Broadcom, while the consumer side carried on as NortonLifeLock, now Gen Digital. Its arch-rival throughout was McAfee.