NOD32's "ancestors" were born around the time the first computer viruses appeared. At that time an extremely popular TV series was being broadcast on Czechoslovak Television ... a series which was later translated into many other languages and became known in many other countries. The name of this TV series was "Nemocnica na Okraji Mesta" ... in English, "Hospital at the Edge of the City". The first viruses attacked disk boot sectors, which are located at the edge of a disk. An antivirus program could in a sense be considered a hospital ... "nemocnica" in the Slovak and Czech languages. We decided to name the newly created antivirus program “Nemocnica na Okraji Disku” ... which in English would read “Hospital at the Edge of the Disk”.
We originally called our program "enn oh dee" ... the name by which it became well known and respected in Eastern European IT circles ... but thanks to worldwide expansion over the past couple of years the program is now almost universally referred to as "nod" ... in fact, some English language reviewers have "given the nod to NOD", and one of the nicknames given to our Australian partner by the VX (virus underground) is "Noddy Roddy".
Today's NOD32 is, of course, entirely different from the original NOD. Several generations of the program were developed over the years to handle ever-changing and increasingly complex computer viruses, finally culminating in the powerful 16-bit NOD-ICE. When the 32-bit processor appeared, a brand new program was created from the ground up to suit this new platform ... and “Nemocnica na Okraji Disku 32”, or "NOD32", was born.
NOD32's core development team has been with us from the very start, and we believe they are the most talented and highly skilled group of virus researchers and antivirus programmers in the world today. They have consistently maintained the unsurpassed quality of the NOD32 Antivirus System since its release in May 1988.... and since that day, NOD32 has not missed a single "in the wild" virus in a Virus Bulletin test. Thanks to their efforts, based on independent evaluation by the professional antivirus experts at Virus Bulletin, NOD32 has consistently provided higher detection efficiency and faster hard disk scanning than any other antivirus program in the world for the past four years.
We've come a long way from being "The little antivirus program with the funny name from the country hardly anyone has ever heard of". Our program still has a funny name, but NOD32 isn't just another “one hit wonder” ... it's a stable antivirus system with a long tradition of being #1, from a company with a sound economic history.
