Norton was born in Aberdeen, Washington and raised in Seattle. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 1965. Before discovering microcomputers, he spent a dozen years working on mainframes and minicomputers for companies including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His earliest low level system utilities were designed to allow mainframe programmers access to some previous RAM that IBM normally reserved for diagnostics. This foreshadowed his personal computer work, where he became known as a savvy author of low level system utilities and reference books.
When the IBM PC made its debut in 1981, Norton was among the first to buy one. After he was laid off during an aerospace industry cutback, he took up microcomputer programming to make ends meet. One day he accidentally erased a file. Rather than re-enter the data, as most would have, he decided to write a program to recover the information from the disk. His friends were delighted with the program and he developed a group of utility programs that he sold...one at a time...to user groups. In 1982, he founded Peter Norton Computing with $30,000 and an IBM computer.
The company was a pioneer in DOS-based utilities software. Its 1982 introduction of the Norton Utilities included Norton's popular UNERASE tool to retrieve erased data from DOS disks. Norton marketed the program (primarily on foot) through his one-man software publishing company, leaving behind little pamphlets with technical notes at users group meetings and computer stores. A publisher saw his pamphlets, and saw that he could write about a technical subject. The publisher called him and asked him if he wanted to write a book. Norton's first computer book, Access to Advanced Features & Programming Techniques, was published in 1983. Eight editions of this best seller were published, the last in 1999. Norton wrote several other technical manuals and introductory computing books. He began writing monthly columns in 1982 for PC Magazine and PC Week magazines as well, which he wrote until 1987. He soon became recognized as a principal authority on IBM personal computer technology.
In 1984, Norton Computing reached $1 million in revenue, and version 3.0 of the Norton Utilities was released. Norton had three clerical people working for him. He was doing all of the software development, all of the book writing, all of the manual writing and running the business. The only thing he wasn't doing was stuffing the packages. He hired his fourth employee and first programmer, Brad Kingsbury, in July 1985. According to Kingsbury, "My job responsibility was to develop the software, and that's what I did. I just developed the programs, and that was pretty much the last day Peter programmed." Kingsbury was the sole designer and programmer of the Norton Utilities from Version 3.1 to Version 5.0. He developed such programs as Speed Disk, UnFormat, Quick UnErase, Calibrate, Disk Editor and Disk Doctor.Kingsbury spent six months working from the Nortons’ kitchen table, while Norton did his writing, managing and marketing from the den of his home. In late 1985, Norton hired a business manager to take care of the day-to-day operations.
In 1985, Norton Computing produced the Norton Editor, a programmer's text editor created by Stanley Reifel, and Norton Guides, a TSR program which showed reference information for assembly language and other IBM PC internals, but could also display other reference information compiled into the appropriate file format. Norton Commander, a file managing tool for DOS, was introduced in 1986.
In September 1983, Norton started work on The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC. The book was a popular and comprehensive guide to low-level programming on the original PC platform (covering BIOS and MS-DOS system calls in great detail). The first (1985) edition was nicknamed "the pink shirt book", after the pink shirt that Norton wore for the cover photo, and Norton's crossed-arm pose on that cover is a U.S. registered trademark. The second (1988) edition, renamed The New Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC & PS/2, again featured the crossed arms, pink shirt cover image. Richard Wilton co-authored the second edition. This was followed by the third (1993) edition of "the Norton book", renamed The Peter Norton PC Programmer's Bible, co-authored with Wilton and Peter Aitken. Later editions of Peter Norton's Inside the PC, a broad-brush introduction to personal computer technology, featured Norton in his crossed-arm pose on the cover, wearing a white shirt.
Norton Computing revenue climbed steadily to $5 million in 1986, $11 million in 1987, and $15 million in 1988. Its products won several utility awards, and it was ranked 136th on the 1988 Inc. magazine list of the 500 fastest-growing private companies in America, with 38 employees. Norton himself was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Arthur Young & Co. (1988 High Technology Award Winner Greater Los Angeles Region) and Venture Magazine.
On April 12, 1989, Norton appointed Ron Posner chief executive of Norton Computing. Norton continued as chairman. Posner's goal was to rapidly grow the company into a major software vendor. Soon after his arrival, Posner hired a new president, a new chief financial officer, and added a vice president of sales.
In August 1990, Norton sold his $25 million (1989 sales) Santa Monica, California based company to Symantec for $70 million. Posner orchestrated the merger. Norton was given one third of Symantec's stock, worth about $60 million, and a seat on Symantec's board of directors. The acquired company became a division of Symantec and was renamed Peter Norton Computing Group. Most of Norton Computing's 115 employees were retained. The Norton brand name lives on in such Symantec products as Norton AntiVirus, Norton 360, Norton Internet Security, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton SystemWorks (which now contains a current version of the Norton Utilities), Norton AntiBot, Norton AntiSpam, Norton GoBack (formerly Roxio GoBack), Norton PartitionMagic (formerly PowerQuest PartitionMagic), and Norton Ghost. However, Symantec's "Norton" programs preserve little of the streamlined elegance or bullet-proof nature of the programs produced by Peter or under his direct stewardship. Norton's image was used on the packaging of all Norton-branded products until 2001.
In 1990, Norton had a letter published in Cecil Adams' "Straight Dope" column.
In 2002, Acorn Technologies lured Norton out of a 10-year business hibernation. Norton has a "significant investment" in the company and serves as Chairman of Acorn's Board of Directors.
Norton is also chairman of eChinaCash, a company he founded in 2003. Posner is CEO.
In 1983 Norton married Eileen Harris, who grew up in Watts, California. They had two children, and lived in the Los Angeles area. In the summer of 1990 they enjoyed a visit to Martha's Vineyard and returned the following year with their children, purchasing an 1891, eight bedroom Queen Anne house in Oak Bluffs. They bought and lived in a nearby home while initiating re-design of the main house. "My children are half black, and we thought Oak Bluffs would give them an opportunity to summer around other kids like them," Norton said in a 2007 interview with Laura D. Roosevelt for Martha's Vineyard Magazine.
In 2000, the couple divorced. Norton henceforth lived much of the time in New York. In February 2001, a fire caused by faulty wiring destroyed the Martha's Vineyard home, which had been restored in 1994 under the direction of the Cambridge and Nantucket architectural firm of Design Associates. Norton decided to have it rebuilt, again working with Design Associates on the reconstruction, to almost exactly as it was before the fire. Meanwhile, he began a relationship with New York financier Gwen Adams who, being an "Islander" in origin herself, also liked the area. Since then, the couple spend ten weeks of summer in the Corbin-Norton House annually, usually hosting several guests. They were married in a church in nearby Edgartown; the ceremony was performed on the island by their neighbor, author and scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr..
Peter and Eileen founded the Peter Norton Family Foundation in 1989, which gives financial support to visual and contemporary non-profit arts organizations, as well as human social services organizations. Norton also serves on the boards of the California Institute of the Arts, Reed College, Crossroads School , and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With his first wife, Norton accumulated one of the largest modern contemporary art collections in the United States. Many of the pieces are on loan all over the world at any given time, and many were on view at Symantec Corporation, which purchased Peter Norton Computing in 1990. The foundation and the Norton Family Office are located in Santa Monica. ARTnews magazine regularly lists Norton among the world's top 200 collectors.
In 1999, Norton purchased letters written to Joyce Maynard by reclusive author J.D. Salinger for US$156,500. (Salinger had a year-long affair with Maynard in 1972 when she was 18.) Maynard said she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons. Norton announced that his intention was to return the letters to Salinger.
