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| Industry | Software Development |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1980; 46 years ago (1980) inCentral Point, Oregon |
| Founder | Michael Burmeister-Brown |
| Defunct | 1994 (1994) |
| Fate | Acquired bySymantec |
| Headquarters | |
| Parent | Gen Digital  |
Central Point Software, Inc. (CP, CPS, Central Point) was a leading software utilities maker for thePC market, supplying utilities software for theMS-DOS andMicrosoft Windows markets. It also producedApple II copy programs. Through a series of mergers, the company was acquired by Symantec in 1994.
CPS was founded by Michael Burmeister-Brown (Mike Brown)[1] in 1980 inCentral Point, Oregon, for which the company was named. Building on the success of its Copy II PC backup utility, it moved toBeaverton, Oregon. In 1990, Corey Smith was president.[1] In 1993 CPS acquired theXTree Company.[2] It was itself acquired bySymantec in 1994, for around $60 million.[3]
The company's most important early product was a series of utilities which enabled evasion ofcopy protection, allowing exact duplicates to be made ofcopy-protecteddiskettes, duplicating the analog fingerprinting measures. The first version, Copy II Plus v1.0 (for theApple II), was released in June 1981.[4] With the success of theIBM PC andcompatibles, a version for that platform - Copy II PC (copy2pc) - was released in 1983.[5] As of August 1985[update] CPS said that Copy II PC was capable of copying 90% of software.[6]
By then CPS said it had sold 10,000 Copy II PC Deluxe Boards, at a rate of several thousand a month. Mostly marketed to existing customers of Copy II PC, the expansion card comes with a special version of that software. CPS said that 1,000 beta testers found that the card was capable of copying Softguard's Superlock, and only failing againstProlok.[6] The card is able to read, write, and copy disks from Apple II andMacintosh computer systems as well. Copy II PC's main competitor wasQuaid Software'sCopyWrite, which did not have a hardware component.
CPS also released Option Board hardware with TransCopy software for duplicating copy-protected floppy diskettes.[7]
In 1985, CPS releasedPC Tools, an integrated graphical DOS shell and utilities package. PC Tools was an instant success and became Central Point's flagship product, and positioned the company as the major competitor toPeter Norton Computing and itsNorton Utilities andNorton Commander. CPS later manufactured a Macintosh version calledMac Tools. CPS licensed the Mirror, Undelete, and Unformat components of PC Tools toMicrosoft for inclusion in MS-DOS versions 5.x and 6.x as external DOS utilities. CPS File Manager was ahead of its time, with features such as viewZIP archives as directories and a file/picture viewer.
In 1993, CPS released PC Tools forWindows 2.0 which ran onWindows 3.1. After the Symantec acquisition the programmer group that created PCTW 2.0 createdNorton Navigator forWindows 95 and Symantec unbundled the File Manager used in PCTW 2.0 and released it as PC-Tools File Manager 3.0 for Windows 3.1
The lateness of PCTW to the Windows market was a major factor in why CPS was acquired by Symantec.[citation needed]Windows Server at the time was not viewed as a credible alternative toNovell NetWare - the first version of Windows Server was released in 1993 - and the desktop and server software products market was completely centered on Novell NetWare. The subsequent stumble by Novell to maintain dominance in the server market came years later and had nothing to do with the acquisition. Instead, like many software vendors, CPS underestimated how rapidly users were going to shift to Windows from DOS.
CPS's other major desktop product was Central Point Anti-Virus (CPAV), whose main competitor wasNorton AntiVirus. CPAV was a licensed version ofCarmel Software'sTurbo Anti-Virus; CPS, in turn, licensed CPAV to Microsoft to createMicrosoft Antivirus for DOS (MSAV) and Windows (MWAV).
CPS also released CPAV for Netware 3.xx and 4.x Netware servers in 1993.
Central Point also sold theApple II cloneLaser 128 by mail.[8]
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