The personal computing boom of the 1980s created urgent new problems alongside its opportunities, and one of the most pressing was the spread of malicious software targeting everyday users. John McAfee, born on September 18, 1945, in Cinderford, England, became one of the more prominent and eventually controversial figures to emerge from that period in computing history.

McAfee held dual citizenship in the United Kingdom and the United States and was educated at Roanoke College. He worked across several roles during his career — programmer, computer scientist, engineer, and businessperson — before also stepping into politics. In 1987 he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software and founded McAfee Associates to sell it, placing him at the center of a growing industry built around protecting personal computers. He resigned from McAfee Associates in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company, marking a clean break from the organization that bore his name.

That break eventually became something more pointed. McAfee later urged consumers to uninstall the company's anti-virus software and publicly disavowed the company's continued use of his name in its branding. Alongside those public disputes, he pursued a political career, twice seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States — once in 2016 and again in 2020 — without success on either occasion. His career, then, moved across software development, business, and electoral politics, though none of those later chapters carried the concrete industry impact of his 1987 work.

McAfee died on June 23, 2021, at Centre Penitenciari Brians 2, a prison facility, bringing a turbulent public life to a close. He was 75. The arc from founding a commercial anti-virus company in the late 1980s to his death in a Spanish prison reflects a biography that defied easy categorization — a programmer and businessperson who also ran for the U.S. presidency twice under the Libertarian Party banner, all while disputing the legacy attached to his own name.