- Born on a U.S. military base in Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His mother, Joan Ellen (Williams), was English. His father, Don Harold McAfee, was an American. John was raised mostly in Salem, Virginia. His father committed suicide with a self-inflicted gunshot when McAfee was 15.
- Founder, "McAfee Anti-Virus".
- Favorite author is Philip K. Dick.
- He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 from Roanoke College, which subsequently awarded him an honorary Sc.D. degree in 2008.
- On 11 August 2020, McAfee falsely stated that he was arrested in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic after refusing to replace a lace thong with a more effective face mask. He later tweeted a picture of himself with a bruised eye, claiming it occurred during this arrest.] The photo of the alleged arrest shows an officer with the German word for "police" on his uniform, invalidating McAfee's claim of having been arrested in Norway. The Augsburg police later said he tried to enter Germany on that day, but was not arrested.
- In 1978, he joined Computer Sciences Corporation as a software consultant.
- He was a British-American computer programmer, businessman, and two-time presidential candidate who unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and in 2020.
- McAfee was employed as a programmer by NASA's Institute for Space Studies in New York City from 1968 to 1970 working on the Apollo program. From there, he went to Univac as a software designer, and later to Xerox as an operating system architect.
- Initially McAfee did not seek a large user base of paying users, but rather wanted to raise awareness of the need to be protected from computer viruses. However, by making people fear such malware, he managed to generate millions of sales, and by 1990 he was making $5 million a year.
- He worked for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton from 1980 to 1982.
- On 2 August 2015, McAfee was arrested in Henderson County, Tennessee, on one count of driving under the influence and one count of possession of a firearm while intoxicate.
- In 1987, he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software, founding McAfee Associates to sell his creation. He resigned in 1994 and sold his remaining stake in the company.
- In 1986, while employed by Lockheed, he read about the Brain computer virus made for the PC, and he found it terrifying. Sensing a business opportunity, he went about creating an antivirus software that could detect the computer virus and remove it automatically. In 1987, McAfee created McAfee Associates Inc. to sell this software, which he named VirusScan. This was the first anti-virus software brought to market, and one of the first software products to be distributed over the Internet.
- Unsuccessfully sought the Libertarian Party nomination for president of the United States in 2016 and 2020.
- After leaving McAfee Associates, he founded the companies Tribal Voice (makers of the PowWow chat program), QuorumEx, and Future Tense Central, among others, and was involved in leadership positions in the companies Everykey, MGT Capital Investments, and Luxcore, among others.
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