Norton actually started out as one rather nice guy named Peter Norton. He had some hefty technical expertise staked out as his domain (like Steve Gibson today at grc.com) and produced a handful of cheap and excellent utilities. Symantec bought his name when he retired, and proceeded to crew up his products and pile a bunch of other utilities onto the brand, including their own antivirus software (which was state of the art then). I don't think Peter Norton ever actually had an antivirus product himself.

By the time Win98 came out, Symantec had messed up the Norton Utilities to the point that I installed, sighed, and deleted it as a "learning experience." I haven't used a "Norton" product since, much though I am tempted by a reputation that dates back nearly twenty years. Too bad, because in theory their stuff is very useful.

Gibson still makes the best HD recovery software around (SpinRite) and a handful of free utilities, such as Kill the Messenger, which turns off the @#*@#@ MS IM spam delivery applicance, and a neat little tool for fixing a bug in older Zip drives that saved my butt a couple of times.