Gary Grant Hendrix (born May 14, 1948) is an American businessman who founded Symantec Corporation, an international corporation which produces

computer software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

, particularly in the fields of information management and

antivirus software Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. ...

Education

Hendrix obtained his

undergraduate degree An undergraduate degree (also called first degree or simply degree) is a colloquial term for an academic degree earned by a person who has completed undergraduate courses. In the United States, it is usually offered at an institution of higher e ...

at the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

in May 1970 and then received his

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

from the same institution in December 1970. Hendrix decided to study in the

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

field as

Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

announced a series of funding for six projects in

natural language understanding Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subtopic of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an A ...

in 1970. In January 1971, Hendrix enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Texas and was assigned Robert Simmons as his adviser. He completed his dissertation in 1975.

Career

While at the University of Texas, Hendrix published several papers on robotics and planning, which several people from

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

read. This led to an invitation for him to work at SRI, which he accepted and subsequently moved to Menlo Park,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. After several years at SRI, he left with fifteen SRI employees to form Machine Intelligence Corporation, which ultimately failed. Afterward, Hendrix founded Symantec Corporation in 1982 with the help of a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

grant. The company was originally focused on

-related projects, and Hendrix hired several Stanford University natural language processing researchers as the company's first employees. To finance the company, Hendrix went to an American Electronics Association financial conference in

Monterey Monterey (; es, Monterrey; Ohlone: ) is a city located in Monterey County on the southern edge of Monterey Bay on the U.S. state of California's Central Coast. Founded on June 3, 1770, it functioned as the capital of Alta California under bot ...

, California in May 1983. After demonstrating their product on an early

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

computer, businesses became interested in obtaining their product. Hendrix left the company in 1991 and moved to

Dripping Springs, Texas Dripping Springs is a city in Hays County, Texas, United States. The population was 4,650 at the 2020 census. Dripping Springs is a primarily rural town. Geography Dripping Springs is in northern Hays County at (30.191998, –98.085382). It is ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hendrix, Gary Living people Businesspeople in software Gen Digital people University of Texas at Austin alumni People from Menlo Park, California SRI International people 1948 births