Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

There was a time when we used the name “McAfee” generically, so dominant was that software in online security. If someone was experiencing problems that suggested infection with malware we asked, “Are you using your McAfees?”

Three years ago Intel bought McAfee (the company, not the founder whose name it bears). It is operated as a wholly owned subsidiary. But a week or so back, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced that the well known brand name will be dropped, and its products and services will be known as Intel Security.

Since then Mike Fey, the CTO and a veep at McAfee,  has talked about what has changed and what hadn’t, and why.

There will still be a red shield logo. I don’t see any reference to the Scotty dog, which I thought of as a tribute to the founder’s presumed Scottish ancestry. On some of my systems the McAfee watchdog gives one commanding Woof! as the program intercepts something that it thinks should not be allowed to enter. But I fear the Scotty will not be sent to any systems it isn’t on now.

Says Fey, the red shield will remain because “it’s what people knew us as.”  But the name was hard to pronounce in some areas.

Also, Fey says the McAfee part of Intel and Intel Security as a whole have a broader focus these days. “We’re not an AV company anymore…We are in every hot space in security.” He also points out that the Intel name is one of the most recognized corporate monikers on the planet.

Some of us might be excused for wondering whether dropping the McAfee name is a move Intel hopes will keep potential customers from thinking about the reputation McAfee products have had for bloat. Install it on your system, and you would see memory and storage grabbed with both Scotty paws and hung onto with the grip of powerful Scotty jaws.

Perhaps that is why some much lighter rivals gained a lot of market share. The free versions of Panda, Avast and Trend, to name just three, have become very popular with users, even in the corporate world.

Fey has been asked whether the decision to eliminate the McAfee name from its branding and marketing had any basis in the ways founder John McAfee gets into the news, especially tabloid or gossip media.

Heavens no! “It really didn’t,” Fey told a “Dark Reading” interviewer. “When he first started having his challenges south of the border, we did spend a lot of energy checking with focus groups to make sure it wasn’t impacting the brand. We were surprised how little impact it had, especially on the enterprise side. But most know he has not been in enterprise IT for 20-plus years… It didn’t drive our decision process.”

Ah, the mysterious, sometimes elusive, generally colorful John McAfee. So far as I know he is not related to the McAfees of this area, including those who ran Park Filling back in the 1950s. (I didn’t ask. But I think you would have to go back to Noah to find the connection.)

John McAfee was born in the British Isles but grew up in Virginia. He attended Roanoke College and earned a degree in math. (I believe Roanoke is where John Cawley, formerly of Port, is a professor.)

McAfee worked for two years as a programmer for the NASA’s Institute for Space Studies in New York. Then he designed software for Univac. Next he was an operating system architect for Xerox. That brings us up to 1978, when McAfee served Computer Sciences Corporation as a consultant.

At some point in the 1980s McAfee obtained a copy of the infamous Pakistani Brain computer virus. He set about developing programs to repel viruses.

McAfee Associates was formed in 1987, to sell the resulting anti-virus programs. It wasn’t that no one else had marketed anti-virus software, but no one else had done so via the shareware method, which proved very effective.

Some computer makers began selling systems with McAfee AV preloaded. The trial version would need to be licensed, for a fee, before long.

By 1989 McAfee Associates was going great guns, and McAfee quit Lockheed to devote full time to the company. The company was incorporated in incorporation heaven, aka Delaware, in 1992, while McAfee lived in Santa Clara, Calif. But he resigned from the company in 1994. The company went public, and a couple more years down the road McAfee cashed out his remaining stock for a tidy sum.

Network Associates had been formed as a merger of Network General and McAfee Associates, but was renamed McAfee later, and that is the company Intel bought. Meanwhile, John McAfee was involved in Tribal Voice (Pow Wow), early instant messaging). He was part of Zone Labs, makers of firewall software, which was bought by Check Point in 2003.

John McAfee lost a bunch of money in the recession, his personal assets being said to drop from $100 million to a measly $4 mil. Still, early in 2010 he started a company focused on anti-quorum sensing and called QuorumEx, headquartered in Belize. It aims to produce all-natural antibiotics, which some predict will revolutionize health care.

Last year McAfee launched Future Tense Central, to produce a secure network device, the D-Central.

Meanwhile, in 2012, Belize police raided his compound and charged him with drug possession and having an unlicensed gun, charges later dropped. Then Gregory Faull, of a nearby Belize island, also a U.S. expat, was found murdered, and local police called McAfee a person of interest. He flew to Guatemala, which deported him to the U.S., where he lives near Seattle, practices yoga, and is hard at work on his memoirs.

He is said to have good security, including motorcycle gang members who serve as bodyguards. No mention of a Scotty dog.