WordPerfect, Novell, and the First Silicon Slopes

Before anyone called this stretch of Utah between Provo and Salt Lake City the Silicon Slopes, before the venture capital and the IPOs and the tech campuses, there were two companies in adjacent cities writing software in an era when the personal computer was still a novelty. WordPerfect started in Provo in nineteen seventy-nine. The founders were Alan Ashton, a BYU computer science professor, and Bruce Bastian, a graduate student.

They called the company Satellite Software International and wrote a word-processing program under contract for the city of Orem. By nineteen eighty-two it was being sold for personal computers. By nineteen eighty-seven, WordPerfect was the best-selling word processor in the country, ahead of Microsoft Word.

It held that position for nearly a decade. Novell was founded the following year in nearby Orem as a maker of computer hardware. It pivoted to networking software and under Ray Noorda became the company that built NetWare, the network operating system that held roughly sixty percent of the server market during the early nineteen nineties.

In nineteen ninety-four, Novell purchased WordPerfect for one point four billion dollars. That merger did not go well; Novell sold WordPerfect to Corel two years later for a fraction of what it had paid. Both companies are diminished from what they were.

But what they seeded did not disappear. Qualtrics started in a Provo basement in two thousand two. When it was acquired for eight billion dollars in two thousand eighteen, it was the largest software acquisition in Utah history.

The pattern Ashton and Bastian established, build it here, with BYU talent, without debt, proved more durable than either company.