The surname McAfee will probably sound familiar to many. It was the first antivirus company in the United States that worked under the shareware model. The company was founded by John McAfee, a programmer who was born in Scotland but actually lived in Salem, Virginia. He received his mathematics degree in 1967 and has an honorary doctorate from Roanoke University since 2008.

John McAfee worked as a programmer for the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York from 1968 to 1970. From there he switched to Univac as a software designer. He then joined Xerox in the operating system group. In the eighties of the last century, he worked at Lookheed when he received the Brain virus and then started working to develop antivirus. In 1989 he resigned from Lockheed and began working full time at his antivirus company, McAfee Associates, which was initially operating from his home in Santa Clara, California. Nowadays it is still maintained as an important company in the niche of computer viruses.

And all this would seem relatively common in a programmer's biography, but some interesting twists began in his life. For example, he founded Tribal Voice, one of the first instant messaging programs PowWow. McAfee's personal fortune, estimated at $ 100 million in 2009, fell to $ 4 million because of the global financial crisis and the recession in its investments.