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 acquired by Symantec in 1994.

CPS was the major competitor to Peter Norton Computing. Its flagship product PC Tools, an integrated graphical DOS shell and utilities package, competed against Norton Utilities and Norton Commander; CPS also manufactured a Macintosh version called Mac Tools. 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. It is believed that Windows 95 was largely based on CPS Desktop.^{[citation needed]} CPS File Manager was ahead of its time, with features such as view ZIP archives as directories and a file/picture viewer. Symantec was saying "defrag in a multi-tasking environment is impossible" and CPS did it. Symantec's solution was to buy them out.

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

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.