Central Point Software

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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 Windows markets. CPS was acqured by Symantec in 1994.

CPS was the major competitor to Peter Norton Computing. Its flagship product, PC Tools competed against Norton Utilities and Norton Commander, being an integrated graphical DOS shell and utilities package. 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 also manufactured a Macintosh version of PC Tools, called Mac Tools.

It's other major product was Central Point Anti-Virus (CPAV), which was a licensed version of Camel Software's Turbo Anti-Virus. CPS in turn licensed CPAV to Microsoft to create Microsoft Antivirus for DOS and Windows (MSAV & MWAV). CPAV's main competitor was Norton Antivirus.

CPS also had a hardware add-in expansion card, sold as an expansion to allow copying of copy protected diskettes and disks formatted for the Macintosh. This board, the COPY II PC Deluxe Board worked in conjunction with the COPY II PC software (which did not require the board). COPY II PC's main competitor was Quaid Software's CopyWrite, which did not have a hardware component.