1980 to 1989: The Rise of Personal Computers and Personal Software - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 211

acquired full rights to Objective-C for a single one-time payment of less than
$100,000.
According to one source that analyzes use of programming language on the in-
ternet, the Objective-C language is currently the third most widely used program-
ming language on the planet.
Symantec
Symantec is now a major vendor of security packages to protect personal com-
puters. It was founded in 1982 by Gary Hendrix in Mountain View, California,
which is one of the central Silicon Valley communities. Symantec was funded by
a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
At first, Symantec built artificial intelligence tools and a natural language data-
base application that ran on DEC computers. These proved to be difficult to port
to personal computers, so Symantec more or less had no product, but they still had
some interesting and valuable intellectual property.
Symantec was acquired by another company called C&E Software founded by
the entrepreneurs Dennis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks. They decided to keep
the name Symantec for the merged business. Their products included word pro-
cessing, file management, and a natural language query tool called The Intelligent
Assistant that was a pioneer in database queries and report generation. Their com-
bined database and word processing tool was called Q&A for “question and an-
swer.”
To increase sales, Symantec started a very unusual sales program called six
pack . Every employee was asked to work 6 days a week, visit six dealerships per
day, and train six sales representatives per store. To keep costs low, they were
asked to stay with friends or use a Motel 6 in keeping with the six-pack theme.
For a while, Symantec's revenues were so low that the Chairman and President re-
ceived zero salary, vice presidential salaries were cut 50%, and other employees'
salaries were cut 15%.
In 1986, Symantec formed a subsidiary division called Turner Hall that mar-
keted third-party software plus add-ons that supported other products such as
Lotus. As revenues increased, Symantec made an acquisition of Breakthrough
Software, the developer of the TimeLine project management tool. In 1989, Sy-
mantec had a successful IPO.
As a result of the merger plus the Turner Hall subsidiary, Symantec had three
fairly autonomous business units, which seemed to fit the corporate culture and