Gary Hendrix, a computer science doctorate, was working at the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California on AI natural language processing and semantics in the mid-1970s. In 1979, with a $25,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, he formed the Machine Intelligence Corporation with colleagues from SRI, where they designed and ran their language algorithms on recently released Apple II computers. Gaining a huge $30m in funding from multiple backers, the company quickly burned its cash and failed. Convinced he could make something, Hendrix returned to his job at SRI, and in 1982 he formed Symantec. Acquiring Peter Norton Computing in 1990, Symantec became best known for its Norton Utilities software. In 2019, Symantec was acquired by Broadcom and became NortonLifeLock.