Mr. Peter Norton

Before discovering microcomputers, he spent a dozen years working on mainframes and minicomputers for companies including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His earliest low level system utilities were designed to allow mainframe programmers access to some previous RAM that IBM normally reserved for diagnostics. In 1982, he founded Peter Norton Computing with $30,000 and an IBM computer. The company was a pioneer in DOS-based utilities software. Its 1982 introduction of the Norton Utilities included Norton's popular UNERASE tool to retrieve erased data from DOS disks. By August 1990, Norton sold his $25 million (yearly sales) Santa Monica, California based company to Symantec, which continues to use his name and image on its products.