Central Point Software, Inc. (CP, CPS, Central Point) was a leading software utilities maker for the PC market, supplying utilities software for the

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

markets. It also produced

Apple II Apple II ("apple Roman numerals, two", stylized as Apple ][) is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The Apple II (original), original Apple II model, which gave the series its name, was designed ...

copy programs. Through a series of mergers, the company was acquired by Symantec in 1994.

History

CPS was founded by Michael Burmeister-Brown (Mike Brown) in 1980 in Central Point, Oregon, for which the company was named. Building on the success of its Copy II PC backup utility, it moved to Beaverton, Oregon. In 1990, Corey Smith was president. In 1993 CPS acquired the

XTree XTree is a file manager program originally designed for use under DOS. It was published by Executive Systems, Inc. (ESI) and first released on 1 April 1985, and became highly popular. The program uses a character-mode interface, which has man ...

Company. It was itself acquired by Symantec in 1994, for around $60 million.

Products

The company's most important early product was a series of utilities which enabled evasion of

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found on vid ...

, allowing exact duplicates to be made of copy-protected

diskette A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

s, duplicating the analog fingerprinting measures. The first version, Copy II Plus v1.0 (for the

), was released in June 1981. With the success of the IBM Personal Computer, IBM PC and IBM PC compatible, compatibles, a version for that platform - Copy II PC (copy2pc) - was released in 1983. CPS said that Copy II PC was capable of copying 90% of software. 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 against Prolok. The card is able to read, write, and copy disks from Apple II and

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computer systems as well. Copy II PC's main competitor was Quaid Software's ''CopyWrite'', which did not have a hardware component. CPS also released Option Board hardware with TransCopy software for duplicating copy-protected floppy diskettes.Option Board archive questions and answers.
/ref> In 1985, CPS released PC 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 to Peter Norton Computing and its

Norton Utilities Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8, released 26 Octob ...

and

Norton Commander Norton Commander (NC) is a discontinued prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired in 1990 by the NortonLifeLock, Symantec corporation). NC provides a text-based user i ...

. CPS later manufactured a Macintosh version called ''Mac Tools''. CPS licensed the Mirror, Undelete, and Unformat components of PC Tools to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

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 view ZIP archives as directories and a file/picture viewer. In 1993, CPS released PC Tools for Windows 2.0 which ran on

Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series run as a shell on top of MS-DOS; it was the last Windows 1 ...

. After the Symantec acquisition the programmer group that created PCTW 2.0 created Norton Navigator for

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

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.

Windows Server Windows Server (formerly Windows NT Server) is a brand name for Server (computing), server-oriented releases of the Windows NT operating system (OS) that have been developed by Microsoft since 1993. The first release under this brand name i ...

at the time was not viewed as a credible alternative to

Novell NetWare NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the Internetwork Packet Exchange, IPX network protocol. The f ...

- 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 was Norton AntiVirus. CPAV was a licensed version of ''Carmel Softwares ''Turbo Anti-Virus''; CPS, in turn, licensed CPAV to Microsoft to create Microsoft 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 the Apple II clone Laser 128 by mail.

List of CPS products

* '' PC Tools'' * ''PC Tools for Windows'' * ''Central Point Anti-Virus'' * ''Central Point Anti-Virus for NetWare'' * ''Central Point Backup'' * ''Central Point Desktop'' * ''Central Point Commute'' * ''Copy II Plus'' (for Apple II) * ''Copy II 64'' (for Commodore 64/128) * ''Copy II PC'' * ''Copy II Mac'' * ''Copy II ST'' (for Atari ST/TT series computers) * ''MacTools'' and ''MacTools Pro'' * ''More PC Tools'' * ''

LANlord LANlord was a DOS, Windows, and OS/2 workstation management system originally developed by Client Server Technologies Group, which got seed funding from Microcom who ultimately later sold the LANlord group in February 1994 to Central Point Soft ...

'' * ''Deluxe Option Board''

References

External links

Central Point Software
at

archive.org The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including websites, software applic ...

PC Tools
at

{{Authority control 1980 establishments in Oregon 1994 disestablishments in Oregon Central Point, Oregon Defunct companies based in Oregon Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct software companies of the United States Gen Digital acquisitions Software companies disestablished in 1994 Software companies established in 1980

History

Products

List of CPS products

See also

References

External links