(In the 1990s, a friend of mine wrote a book with Norton: By then, I gathered, writing a book with Peter Norton involved…well, pretty much writing a book.)Īnd all along, that image of a thoughtful-looking computer nerd with crossed arms was instantly recognizable. And then, in 1990, he sold Peter Norton Computing to Symantec, which made the Norton line of software even more successful.Īfter the sale, Peter Norton himself retained a high profile as a living symbol of PC maintenance his personal brand was so powerful that it transcended his actual involvement in products which bore his name. Norton’s empire grew to include multiple software products, articles (including a long-running PC Magazine column), and books. Its killer app: UnErase, which could recover lost files back before trashcan-style deletion let you change your mind after getting rid of a file. Norton was a mainframe and minicomputer programmer who bought an IBM PC soon after its 1981 release and published an enormously successful suite of software tools, the Norton Utilities, in 1982. I found seeing him again–even without his own head–to be a surprisingly Proustian experience. It’s the torso, rolled-up sleeves and folded arms of Peter Norton, the man who was once synonymous with PC utility software, on a vintage shirt produced to promote one of his products. Recently on Facebook, my friend, nerd extraordinaire Esther Schindler, shared a photograph of herself wearing an old T-shirt and challenged her followers to identify it:Įither you have no idea what that image means, or you know exactly what it is.
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