Peter Norton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Norton (born November 14, 1943) is an American software publisher, author, and philanthropist.
Norton was born in Aberdeen, Washington and attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 1965. In the 1980s, he produced a popular tool to retrieve erased data from DOS disks, which was followed by several other tools which were collectively known as the Norton Utilities.
Along with Norton Utilities, Norton produced Norton Commander, a very popular file managing tool for DOS; Norton Guides, a TSR program which showed reference information for assembly language and other IBM PC internals, but could also display other reference information compiled into the appropriate file format; and Norton Editor, a programmer's text editor.
Norton and his company, Peter Norton Computing, also produced several other programs, technical manuals, and introductory computing books. Norton is best known for The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM-PC, a popular and comprehensive guide to low-level programming on the PC platform (covering BIOS and MSDOS system calls in great detail). The first edition of this was nicknamed "the pink shirt book", after the pink shirt Norton wore in the cover photo. Although the second edition showed Norton wearing a white shirt, in the third and subsequent editions he returned to a pink shirt.
In 1990, Norton sold the company to Symantec. However, the Norton brand name lives on in such Symantec products as Norton AntiVirus, Norton Internet Security, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton SystemWorks (which now contains a current version of the Norton Utilities), Norton AntiSpam, Norton GoBack (formerly Roxio GoBack), Norton PartitionMagic and Norton Ghost. Norton's visage was used on the packaging of all Norton-branded products until 2001.
Norton and his wife later founded the Peter Norton Family Foundation, which gives financial support to visual and contemporary non-profit arts organizations, as well as human social services organizations.
Norton remains in Washington although the majority of his family lives in Minnesota. Norton is a descendent of John Norton (Mohawk chief) and Minnesota Senator Daniel S. Norton.
The couple separated in 2000 but remain married. They own one of the largest modern contemporary art collections in the US. Many of the pieces are on loan all over the world at any given time. The foundation and the Norton Family Office are located in Santa Monica. ARTnews magazine regularly lists Norton in the world's top 200 collectors.
Norton is the president of the Peter Norton Family Foundation. He also serves on the boards of Creative Capital Foundation, the California Institute of the Arts, Reed College, Crossroads School, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Acorn Technologies.
In 1999, Norton purchased letters written to Joyce Maynard by reclusive author J.D. Salinger for $156,000. (Salinger had a year-long affair with Maynard in 1972 when she was 18.) Maynard said she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons. Norton announced his intention was to return the letters to Salinger [1].
