PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991 as a guerilla cryptography tool to fight government restrictions on encryption. By 1996, it was commercialized as PGP, Inc. In , coincidentally the same month as the McAfee/Network General merger, Network Associates (NAI) acquired PGP, Inc. for approximately $35 million. The logic was sound: combine antivirus, network sniffing, and email encryption into a unified security suite.

Network General was born from a Stanford University project in 1986, commercializing the first network protocol analyzer. Throughout the 1990s, "Sniffer" was the gold standard for troubleshooting Ethernet and Token Ring networks. But by 1997, Network General faced a problem: the internet was moving from monitoring traffic to securing it. The company realized that controlling endpoints (via Helix’s Landesk) combined with network visibility (Sniffer) could create a powerful "desktop-to-data center" governance suite. Thus, the Helix acquisition was meant to flesh out this vision.

The intertwined histories of Helix, Network General, McAfee, and PGP illustrate a classic boom-and-bust cycle of tech mergers. The 1997–1998 frenzy created a monolithic but dysfunctional Network Associates. The early 2000s saw a necessary disaggregation, spinning off Helix (Landesk) and PGP. Then, the 2010 re-acquisition of PGP by McAfee completed a strange circle. Today, no single vendor carries all four original names, but their DNA—in endpoint management (Ivanti), network analysis (NetScout), antivirus (Trellix), and encryption (OpenPGP)—continues to underpin modern cybersecurity. The lesson: in software, names change, but code and contracts are forever.

Network Associates (NAI) was now a bloated giant with five divisions: McAfee antivirus, Sniffer network analysis, Magic Solutions (helpdesk), Landesk (from Helix), and an exit from PGP. The company was losing money and focus.

For the next six years, PGP Corporation thrived independently, acquiring other crypto firms (like Guardian Edge). Meanwhile, McAfee, Inc. grew into a $5 billion security giant, but it lacked native, strong encryption. In , Intel announced a blockbuster acquisition of McAfee for $7.68 billion. But before that closed, McAfee itself needed to fill its encryption gap.